Light on Feet of Clay: A Visit with Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham of 'Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl'

They’ve built a rocket to the moon for a picnic, sheared a sheep-rustling cyberdog, and crossed brainwaves with a bunny while rehoming a pack of hares. Now, thirty-five years after they first appeared on television, the beloved animated duo Wallace and Gromit make their Netflix debut against an old nemesis in the feature film Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.

Their new stop-motion caper sees the enthusiastic but eccentric British inventor Wallace (voiced by Ben Whitehead) and his clever yet silent canine companion Gromit confronted with an old foe: glinty-eyed jewel thief Feathers McGraw, a penguin who often disguises himself as a chicken.

Feathers has been in the clink since Wallace and Gromit captured him in the 1993 Oscar-winning short The Wrong Trousers. But he’s discovered a means of escape and revenge by hacking Wallace’s latest creation: a “smart gnome” designed for odd jobs around town. Cheese and crackers!

Early reviews call the pair “as warm-hearted, bouncy, goofy, and unassumingly sharp as ever,” as charming as their creator, four-time Oscar-winner Nick Park, and his co-director, Emmy-winner Merlin Crossingham, a longtime Aardman Animations colleague.

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Park and Crossingham recently shared a peek at the creativity behind these projects, elaborating on each other’s thoughts over Zoom among clay figures of Wallace and Gromit and their tiny heroes’ West Wallaby Street surroundings.

“From the Mundane Comes the Ridiculous”

Although Park has worked on other Aardman projects such as 2018’s Early Man and the Shaun the Sheep franchise (a Wallace and Gromit spinoff based on the shorn little fella from 1995’s short A Close Shave), Wallace and Gromit are never far from Park’s mind. “They’re always there in my head and in my sketchbooks, suggesting new inventions or new escapades,” he’s said.

A lot of the humor and the aesthetic stems from the films Park enjoyed growing up: the comedies of Norman Wisdom, who frequently played a hapless sort in films such as Trouble in Store (1953), and Ealing Studios films such as Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), and The Ladykillers (1955).

“I don’t know if you’re familiar in the USA with those, but they lived in that old England that was sort of nostalgic,” he said. “The designs of cars, everything was character form … I guess they have that foundation like in The Beatles’ movies, you know. Films set in industrial towns in the north of England with factories nearby.”

While the setting and production design add lots of character, so does following the tone of these earlier films, Crossingham added. “They rely on the fact that the core idea is ridiculous to start with. The premise is silly and funny to begin with, and it’s reflected in Wallace’s house.”

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Wallace and Gromit live in a “very typical, northern English, two-up, two-down house,” Crossingham said, but Wallace has quite the elaborate wakeup routine, full of pulleys, switches, and trap doors to handle everything from getting dressed to making breakfast. Vengeance Most Fowl includes a morning bath with a corkscrew slide jutting from the house’s bricks in three separate spots.

“From the mundane comes the ridiculous,” Crossingham said. “I think regardless of where the story goes, that’s a really important part of the foundation.”

Animators as Actors

Like its predecessors, Vengeance Most Fowl nods at other genres, this time indulging in what Crossingham has called “gnome noir.” Yet beyond the dramatic camera angles and lighting, the film wryly explores “themes of friendship, acceptance with a side of vengeance, and what can happen when our reliance on technology threatens our most treasured relationships,” he’s said.

That sounds like a lot for a brisk hour and nineteen minutes. Yet whether it’s a short or a feature, crafting a Wallace and Gromit piece is an elaborate process. Park collaborated on the story for Vengeance Most Fowl with Mark Burton (Paddington in Peru), a longtime Aardman writer who handled the script.

Crossingham has said that the film took about five years altogether: a year of writing, a year of storyboarding and pre-production, then a few years to ramp up into filming, which lasts about eighteen months, plus post-production.

The crew comprised more than 200 people, with over forty units, or individual sets within the studio. Thirty-two animators worked on each unit, producing up to five seconds of animation a week, production notes say.

The animators met weekly, reviewing all shots frame by frame and noting what worked and what didn’t about the characters, from how they blinked to how they stood. All that tied back into character bibles, references about not just colors and shapes but the characters’ feelings, enabling the animators to render nuanced emotions, production notes say.

Balancing Drama with Laughter

Around the release of 2005’s Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Park mused in The Irish Times that we all have a Wallace and Gromit inside of us: “Wallace is the part that has wild plans. Gromit is the sensible side, reining you in.”

One can’t be sensible and think of the loopy, timeless concoction of slapstick, sight gags, puns, and film references that pepper these antics, though. Park said he takes notes constantly, “keeping sketchbooks. And we have a lot of gag sessions in the room where we’re just thinking of puns and silly lines.”

“Even when we’re writing,” Crossingham said. “Maybe we’re talking about structure or character arc or the more sort of writery things. [But] if an idea for a sight gag comes up, we’ll all start scribbling in our notebooks so when we do come to talk later with the art department or the scenic artists, we don’t forget that we had those ideas. Every opportunity that there is to embellish, we will take it.”

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The team is careful not to get too “gag-festy,” as Park put it, but to use a joke well. “The humor is in the telling,” he said. “It’s a drama about a clay dog and a clay penguin, but you’re doing it in a dramatic, Hollywood kind of way.”

“And then when it does get really dramatic, you undercut it,” Crossingham said.

“We undercut it with a gag, so it never gets too dramatic,” Park said. “There’s always some funny payoff.”

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is now in Theaters and will be released on Netflix on January 3rd, 2025.