‘Cape Fear’ with penguins: making ‘Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl’

The stars of Nick Park’s latest claymation feature film Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl were introduced in A Grand Day Out, a short film that Park made with Bristol’s Aardman Animations 35 years ago. In the intervening years, the director has won four Oscars and five Baftas. And Wallace and Gromit — a cheese-loving northern inventor and his long-suffering pet dog — have become world famous.

“I have to pinch myself,” says Park, talking to Screen International in the restaurant of a London hotel. “A Grand Day Out was this absurdly individual and stupid college film, and then Aardman helped me out with it. I think I always secretly thought that something was going to happen with it. But never this big.”

In some ways, Park’s process is much the same as it was 35 years ago. He is still based at Aardman in Bristol, where all the model-making and stop-motion animation is done in-house. The animation is still mindbogglingly labour-intensive, with each animator completing an average of one-and-a-half seconds of action per day.

But Park’s work is on a somewhat bigger scale than it was in 1989: on any single day of the 15-month production of Vengeance Most Fowl, 35 animators would be working on 35 different scenes simultaneously, while a further five sets were being built or struck. This is why Park has a co-director on the new film, Merlin Crossingham.

“It’s too much to have in one person’s head,” says Crossing­ham, whose sentences interweave with Park’s as they sit together. “One person could do it, but rather than 15 months, you’d be taking 30.”

Another change is that the new film is a co-production between the BBC, which aired it on Christmas Day, and Netflix, which streams globally outside the UK on January 3, with the UK to follow. Park says he always thinks of the BBC as the home of Wallace and Gromit, but Netflix, adds Crossingham, “can take us worldwide”. The two backers collaborated “very harmoniously”, he says. When Park teamed up with DreamWorks on his first feature film Chicken Run, he resisted some pressure to make the jokes less parochial. But Netflix is a bird of a different feather.

“Netflix understood that part of the power of Wallace and Gromit is its Britishness,” says Crossingham. “It’s never been on their agenda to try to stop it being what it needs to be, which is very much a British film.”

BBC and Netflix allowed the filmmakers to follow their own path in other ways, too. Vengeance Most Fowl was initially conceived as a two-episode television mini-series, but nobody objected when screenwriter Mark Burton suggested it might flow better as a single three-act film. “I think we were very spoilt to have that ability to morph it into whatever it needed to be,” says Cunningham.

Contemporary theme

One aspect that has changed since A Grand Day Out is that the new film’s plot chimes with contemporary real-world concerns. Scripted by Burton (who co-wrote Paddington In Peru) and with a story by Park and Burton, Vengeance Most Fowl begins with Gromit being annoyed by Wallace’s over-reliance on gadgets, and develops into the tale of a robotic garden gnome. Park first mulled over this premise for a short film 20 years ago, but he did not commit to it until, much later, he thought of bringing back Feathers McGraw, the villainous penguin from 1993’s Oscar-winning short The Wrong Trousers. Once Feathers was introduced, says Park, “It slowly became a revenge movie — a sort of Cape Fear with penguins.”

It is Feathers who reprogrammes the robotic gnome to do his evil bidding, and so, as gloriously silly as Vengeance Most Fowl is, the film touches on nervousness about technology and artificial intelligence. In Park’s words, the themes are, “Do we trust the tech?” and, “Do we trust those who are in control of the tech?”.

“There is a nostalgia attached to Wallace and Gromit,” explains Crossingham, “but actually, for it to sit well today, it needed a contemporary idea and a contemporary theme. Back when we were talking about the script, AI wasn’t the big subject it is, but it was coming and Mark [Burton] picked up on it immediately.”

Park and Crossingham themselves are careful about the use of such technology. Peter Sallis, the much-loved actor who voiced Wallace, died in 2017 but the directors cast actor Ben Whitehead to replace him rather than using artificial intelligence to recreate Sallis’s voice. “In the same way that our puppets are handmade and have the human touch,” says Crossingham, “I think what makes a performance a performance is the human element. That’s the heart and soul of it. You have to keep hold of that with both hands and not let it go.”

Not that they are technophobes. “The visual effects are the latest in cutting-edge post-production,” insists Crossingham. “Cutting-hedge,” interrupts Park, throwing in a pun from the film.

“The latest in cutting-hedge technology,” continues Crossingham. “And we’d be fools not to use that as filmmakers. They’re some of the best toys in the box. At Aardman, we’re an amazingly diverse studio. We have everything from the most exquisite craftspeople making our sets and our puppets through to technologists who are at the bleeding edge of special-effects and visual-effects technology. But it’s a lovely harmony in being able to get the best of both. I think it’s foolish to ignore one for the benefit of the others because actually they should coexist in the modern world.”

Ultimately, the technology in Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is not there to express the filmmakers’ own fears, but to facilitate some cracking comedy. “Tech lends itself to comedy,” says Park, “because I can’t think of anything more frustrating in the world. We’ve got this central heating system at home which our plumber convinced us to have. And it all relies on having an app. And because the app keeps going down, we can’t control the heating. And it’s just so comedically stupid!”

“You just want a knob, don’t you,” pipes up Crossingham.

“What’s wrong with a knob,” splutters Park. “I don’t want the app! I don’t want to be able to control it from five miles away. I’m happy for a knob when I walk in the house!”

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