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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Forget Colin Farrell as a Gotham City gangster. The most villainous penguin to grace the small screen this year is none other than the fearsome, unflappable Feathers McGraw.
Having had his diabolical diamond heist foiled by one man and his dog (though mainly the dog), the dead-eyed master of disguise clearly has some scores to settle. And so, 31 years after his indelible appearance in the claymation neo-noir masterpiece that was Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers, McGraw returns, hoping to finally get his flippers on the elusive jewel in Aardman Animations’ sparkling new gem of a film.
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl also marks the eponymous double act’s first feature-length adventure since 2005. While the impossibly patient pooch is still the strong silent type, Ben Whitehead has seamlessly taken over from the late Peter Sallis as the voice of eccentric inventor and inveterate bumbler Wallace. Time has otherwise stood still in the quaint, cosy corner of Lancashire where the two cheese-and-cracker connoisseurs lead a life of quiet routine, their retro-futuristic home cluttered with contraptions that tip over beds and catapult condiments. That is until Wallace, the original tech disrupter, misguidedly attempts to shake things up.
Enter Norbot (Reece Shearsmith), a gratingly cheery busybody robot designed to turn the green-pawed Gromit’s Edenic wild garden into a manicured monstrosity. What follows is a gently pointed parable about the dangers of our tech-obsessed times as Norbot (and later an army of gnome clones) wreaks havoc on West Wallaby Street.
To give more away might spoil the fun of seeing how his fastidious efforts to keep things “neat and tidy” end up being corrupted by Feathers McGraw — now a jailbird plotting an escape from behind the bars of his zoo enclosure. It should probably go without saying by now that while Wallace remains utterly oblivious to what’s happening right under his bulbous nose, Gromit is quick to suss out the sinister goings-on.
But while there’s something comforting about this familiar set-up, the story can feel thinly stretched over 75 minutes. And if the tech-scepticism will go over younger viewers’ heads, it might seem a bit slight as satire for more jaded older watchers.
What the extended runtime does afford, however, is more time to admire and get lost in the remarkably realised world that director Nick Park and Co have created. There is scarcely a shot without some pleasing background detail or a joyous visual gag (Gromit reading a book by Virginia Woof, say) or funny film pastiche (such as Feathers sculpting a prison body à la De Niro in Cape Fear).
But beyond this, there is a real cinematic quality and genuine thriller-ish atmosphere to some scenes — not least in the climactic chase that reimagines the famous model railway pursuit from the original short on a stunning scale. At other points, the claymation is so expressive that the masterful performances of Gromit and McGraw seem awards-worthy. That so much is achieved through dexterous handiwork alone is perhaps the film’s most persuasive argument for not ceding creativity to technology.
★★★★☆
BBC1, 6.10pm, Christmas Day and on BBC iPlayer in the UK thereafter. On Netflix outside the UK from January 2