Netflix says there won’t be any trailers for Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl after this one, but with over a month to go before the US premiere, don’t be surprised if they break that promise. At any rate, even if this is the last look we get until January, the special looks — appropriately enough – quite cracking.
Has Wallace’s latest invention, the Smart Gnome, made his dog obsolete? That’s what Gromit is wondering as Norbot, the ceramic lawn ornament with the off-putting grin, seems to be able to perform all the canine’s old chores in half the time and with perfection. But life moves fast on West Wallaby Street and it’s not long before he has something worse to worry about: Feathers McGraw is out of prison! Then the two problems merge when Feathers hijacks the gnomes to do his bidding.
This is the first substantial Wallace & Gromit story since 2008 when A Matter Of Loaf And Death was released. If you’re wondering what took Aardman so long to return to this world. there’s an answer out there. As co-director Merlin Crossingham told the press (reported by the website iO9), “We’ve been making other things. And as a studio of this size, we can’t shoot two things at once — we’re a ‘one film at a time’-size studio, so there’s been a practical reason.”
“In general we don’t bring characters back,” Crossingham said about Feathers. “The early origins of Vengeance Most Fowl, Feathers was not part of. Nick and Mark Burton, the screenwriter… Nick had this idea bubbling away in his sketchbooks since Were-Rabbit times. Ideas come and go, and one finds its own kind of confidence—and at the time it was just a story about Wallace and his latest invention, a smart gnome. [But] it just didn’t generate enough jeopardy in its own right. No one can quite remember how the suggestion of Feathers being involved came around, but it was like a lightbulb moment.”
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl stars the new voice of Ben Whitehead as Wallace after the passing of his original VA Peter Sallis. Reece Shearsmith, Peter Kay, Lauren Patel, Diane Morgan, Adjoa Andoh, Muzz Khan and Lenny Henry voice other characters. As usual, no one voices Gromit. The short film will be released in a handful of theaters December 18, but it’s far more likely most of us will see it on Netflix January 3. (If there IS a theater near you playing it, by all means go!)
