The silent penguin Feathers McGraw has become one of the most famous British animated villains thanks to Aardman’s distinct Claymation style. First introduced in The Wrong Trousers (Park, 1993), McGraw now returns more than 20 years later in Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (Park and Crossingham, 2024), hijacking Wallace’s new invention – a smart gnome named Norbot – to seek his revenge and once again steal the legendary Blue Diamond. The inclusion of the gnome and the wealth of Wallace inventions invites a reading based on the contemporary influx of smart technologies. But I would argue that it also functions as a commentary on the value of the kind of handmade animation that Christopher Holliday (2024) has pointed out characterises Aardman as a studio in an era of artificial intelligence. As well as the challenges it poses for art and animation, thus reinforcing the implicit authentic, personal and artistic quality of Aardman animations.
While Gromit is working in their garden, Wallace first introduces Norbot as a tool designed to help him with manual task that Gromit clearly enjoys although Wallace presents it as ‘toiling away’ and ‘tedious’. Norbot then proceeds to enact a list of gardening jobs, resulting in a garden that is technically tidy but also highly uncanny with its representation of square trees in perfect symmetry. The word uncanny could apply to Norbot as a whole – his roboticized, semi-human face, Reece Shearsmith’s high-pitched inflections for the speaking voice, and his eagerness to always assist suggest smart tools like Siri or Alexa that aim to present a veneer of humanity. Norbot extends his arm to shake hands with Gromit, leading to an exaggerated handshake that according to Kyle Chayka (2023) speaks to a well-documented problem for AI to correctly animate hands and their actions.
Later that night, Feathers McGraw hacks Wallace’s computer, and reprogrammes a charging Norbot by pointedly switching the default setting from ‘good’ to ‘evil’. With new instructions, Norbot gets to work building an army of replica Norbots who share the same uncanny symmetry as the garden. Their manufacturing is presented as a factory assembly line, with Norbot uniformly cutting pipes, shaping metal with a hammer and soldering circuit boards – the repetitive nature of the tasks generates a sense of labour without heart, a stark contrast to Gromit’s gardening in the earlier scene. The army of Norbots are set to work across the neighbourhood and they systematically strip all the gardens of hand tools and equipment while doing their jobs. This is to build the submarine that will help McGraw to break out of his zoo prison, but it also invites the striking metaphor of the machine that so brutally and immediately replaces human activities centred around our physical engagement with the world.
Such a reading is ultimately reinforced by the final scene in the animation, featuring Wallace and Gromit in the garden with a reprogrammed Norbot now helping to recreate Gromit’s original garden look. Before offering Gromit a pat on the head, Wallace announces that the Pat-O-Matic designed to pat Gromit’s head but doing so mechanically and a little too hard has now been repurposed for planting and patting soil. That a hand and the physical sensation of touch is the catalyst for their reconciliation is striking given the tactility of the stop-motion animation technique. Wallace’s comment that ‘there’s some things a machine can’t do’ then seems to be a pointed reflection on the intricacies of Claymation.
As Laura Ivins (2020) notes, the hand is important to the Wallace and Gromit animation – the first glimpse of either character is a close-up of Gromit’s hand, while fingerprints and imperfections on the clay models draw attention to their physicality. Ivins continues to write that the tactility of the animation technique ‘creates intimacy’ (2020: 216), and by explicitly foregrounding the hand in this closing scene, Vengeance Most Fowl draws attention to the cultural and personal connections that can only be generated by our engagement with real artefacts.
References
Chayka, Kyle (2023). The Uncanny Failures of A.I.-Generated Hands. The New Yorker [online].
Holliday, Christoper (2024). In the age of AI, Wallace and Gromit’s Claymation style remains a festive favourite. The Conversation [online].
Ivins, Laura (2020). “Performing Authenticity through Clay in the Wallace and Gromit Films.” In Annabelle Honess Roe (ed.), Aardman Animations: beyond stop-motion. London: Bloomsbury Academic. 211-222.
Reece Goodall is a Director of Student Experience at the University of Warwick, where he completed his PhD thesis comprising an industrial and theoretical analysis of contemporary French horror cinema. He has previously written for French Screen Studies, Horror Studies and Animation Studies, and is the author of the forthcoming monograph French Horror: Industry, Society and Media.
