Nick Park, Aardman extraordinaire and the genius behind Wallace and Gromit, is talking to me about the worst creature on the planet. “Over the years, I’ve been constantly surprised by the amount of people who genuinely hate him,” he says, with the gentle giddiness of your favourite art teacher. “They think he’s evil. But look…” He holds a model of the beast in question up to the lens of his Zoom camera. “He’s only a four-inch tall piece of plasticine.”
Feathers McGraw – thug, monster, penguin with a glove on his head – first debuted in Aardman’s Oscar-winning 1993 short The Wrong Trousers, in which he (shiftily) moved in with Wallace and Gromit while (eerily) plotting to steal a priceless diamond from the local museum (nastily). Feathers’ rottenness served as a blueprint for the series in the aftermath, the beloved duo going up against a cyborg dog, a werewolf-rabbit and a baker-murdering serial killer. And now, in the new Wallace and Gromit feature-length film Vengeance Most Fowl, Feathers is back: the most ghoulish presence on the BBC One Christmas Day line-up who isn’t in the Gavin & Stacey finale.
“He was quite late to the party, actually,” says Merlin Crossingham, Aardman veteran and Park’s co-director on the film. “The script began as a half-hour film about Wallace inventing a smart-gnome. But the more we worked on it, we realised it was lacking something – some menace, some motivation. And Feathers came about like a lightning strike. If we were ever going to bring him back, this was it.”
We find Feathers where we last left him: imprisoned in the city zoo, and unsurprisingly plotting revenge. Wallace, meanwhile, has invented a robotic gnome that can do the housework and mow the garden lawn. “See how embracing technology makes our lives better?” Wallace puts to Gromit, who responds with a customary raised eyebrow. The two plots collide when Feathers decides to hack into the gnome in an elaborate scheme to re-steal the diamond from The Wrong Trousers.
Vengeance Most Fowl is Wallace and Gromit at its best – silly, whimsical and beautifully made as ever (“It’s proof that the traditional can still thrive,” wrote our critic Clarisse Loughrey). Even at its most zany, there remains a kindness to it, along with a mischievous understanding that puns are funny, rural English accents can sound wacky, and that, yes, cheese comes from the moon. Perhaps a tone like this wasn’t quite as novel back in 1989, when we first met the pair in A Grand Day Out, but it feels practically revolutionary in 2024. And in an era of Americanised UK film and television production, where even Doctor Who has been bought by Disney, it nicely retains the innate Britishness that’s always been its superpower.
“It’s that really dry, clever humour mixed with silliness,” suggests actor Lauren Patel, who voices a police detective chasing after Feathers in the film. “It doesn’t take itself too seriously, and it’s something that everybody of every age, every gender and every background can enjoy.”
You stop worrying so much about an impersonation, or hitting the elongated vowels in just the right way. But, saying that, you do want him to sound like Wallace. It’s tough as a fan to hear it and go, ‘That’s not Peter Sallis!’
Ben Whitehead
Patel, like anyone in this country who isn’t a bit of a wrong’un, has adored Wallace and Gromit for as long as she can remember. “Every Christmas growing up, me and my family would watch the films,” she beams. “I had a Feathers McGraw stuffed toy. I had [Aardman’s zoo-set comedy] Creature Comforts on DVD. This has been one of those jobs where you go, ‘OK, six-year-old me would never believe that I would get to do this.’”
When I connect with actor Ben Whitehead, he admits to being a bit nervous. But it’s for a valid reason. Vengeance Most Fowl marks the first feature-length Wallace and Gromit to include Whitehead in the role of Wallace, following the death of original actor Peter Sallis in 2017. Whitehead has been giving voice to the character on and off since 2008, in video games and short films, but Vengeance Most Fowl marks his biggest showcase to date.
“The character has always changed, at least physically,” he tells me. “So Nick and Merlin did give me a little bit of permission to evolve the voice and develop it. That frees you up – you stop worrying so much about an impersonation, or hitting the elongated vowels in just the right way. But, saying that, you do want him to sound like Wallace. It’s tough as a fan to hear it and go, ‘That’s not Peter Sallis!’” He’s been guilty of that himself. “At times, yeah! Because I know it’s silly old me in there.”
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Before you worry, though, the change is seamless. And it’s probably helped that Whitehead has been immersed in Aardman for years – before he officially took over as Wallace, he served as one of the company’s read-in artists, who are essentially stand-in actors used in the recording booth. “In animation, you’re typically not going to get two actors in the same room at the same time, so on [2005’s] The Curse of the Were-Rabbit I was reading Peter’s lines when Ralph Fiennes was doing his lines, and then reading Ralph’s lines when Peter was available.” Later, they’d stitch them all together.
It’s just one example of the extensive work that goes into Aardman productions, much of which you wouldn’t necessarily be aware of. And that feeds into one of the major themes of Vengeance Most Fowl: the dangers of technology without a human touch. Wallace is captivated by his gnome-bot, leaving Gromit feeling blue, and is briefly wooed by the idea that somehow technology and humanity are one and the same: he leaves his gnome (voiced by Reece Shearsmith) to pat Gromit on the head instead of doing it himself, and suggests that Gromit can just get the machine to tend to his garden to save time.
Crossingham says that Aardman isn’t anti-technology, and that computer animation has been used in their work for years, but their concern is about how it’s used. “We always start with stop-motion and use traditional techniques as the starting point,” he says. “But if we can’t, we look at other toys in the box. And if we do use additional computer-animated visual effects, it’s very important that they feel appropriate to our films and that we’re not just using them for using them’s sake.”
But artificial intelligence, Park adds, is a different ball game entirely. “We’re very against it,” he explains. “Or asking AI to do all of those creative things that humans do: the writing; the voice recording. Would AI ever come up with a joke? Would AI ever understand absurdity or irony?”
“And the human touch is vital,” Crossingham says. From off-camera, he produces a plasticine model of Wallace used in the new film, and holds it up to the lens of his camera. “Look at Wallace’s coat here – there are actual thumbprints in it. And that’s everything!”
Vengeance Most Fowl is also a testament to Aardman’s commitment to only making work that feels right – it’s the first Wallace and Gromit feature film since 2005, and the first short since 2008’s A Matter of Loaf and Death. “I remember talking to a certain Hollywood studio about our work and they said, ‘Oh, just think of a good story and put some jokes in’ – but that was so wrong,” Park says. “There needs to be something so absurd and ironic in the DNA of it. It’s hard to define, but you know exactly what it is when you find it.”
Fundamentally, Crossingham suggests, all of the Wallace and Gromit stories are about family. “The two of them have this interesting dynamic where there’s always conflict but they love each other. Sometimes they’re like an elderly couple, but nothing could ever split them up.”
Park agrees. “Wallace is always getting on Gromit’s nerves, but he’d go to the absolute ends of the earth to save him.”
‘Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl’ premieres on BBC iPlayer and BBC One on Christmas Day at 6:10pm