Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave, Wallace & Gromit’s finest outings, have such a wonderful economy to them. They’re impeccably constructed, compact thrillers that fit a surprising amount of story into 30 minutes without ever feeling rushed. They accomplish this partly by never wasting a single shot, and also by maintaining a very limited cast of characters, which gives the audience space to properly soak in all the extraordinary attention to detail, including beautiful production design loaded with countless sight gags. With that in mind, the fact that W&G’s first feature-length film, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, retains the earlier films’ magic even as it vastly expands their world is something of a miracle. But unfortunately it’s not a miracle Vengeance Most Fowl, their second feature, is able to replicate.

Curse has a sprawling cast of characters who all have a stake in the outcome of the story, and even the minor characters are distinctly realized and never far from the action. But most of the supporting players in Vengeance feel more like extras; they’re unmemorable and their limited participation in the plot might have just as well been satisfied by some simple headlines in Gromit’s newspaper. And the plot, though it serves up several dazzlingly complex set pieces, isn’t really that much meatier than those of the short films, and it’s stretched thin at 79 minutes.

As with the rest of the series, the attention to detail in Vengeance is incredible, but the 16-year gap between it and W&G’s previous film (2008’s A Matter of Loaf and Death) is noticeable, mainly in how many effects previously done in-camera are now relegated to post-production. For a series whose charm owes a lot to its tactility, the incorporation even of reasonably tasteful CGI is disappointingly conspicuous, and Vengeance has no shortage of water, fire, and other effects that were clearly not animated by hand. (Thankfully, other divergent techniques used, like 3D-printed puppet parts, are more seamless.)

The good news is, even a lesser entry in the Wallace & Gromit canon is still a pretty great movie, and Vengeance Most Fowl has miles more imagination and ingenuity than virtually any other mass-market animated film in the last 15 years.