Wallace & Gromit Return in Vengeance Most Fowl

The quirky inventor and his trusty four-legged pal are dragged into a rematch

After a brief scare that apparently threatened the end of the business of Aardman Animation, the claymation studio is back with a bang: the treacherous penguin who tormented the adorkable duo Wallace and Gromit in the 1993 episode The Wrong Trousers is now the main villain of his own feature-length film, Vengeance Most Fowl, streaming now on Netflix. (Hmm, a forgotten enemy from an old episode returns in a film? And it happens to be the second film in the franchise? Yes, the pattern is clear. Vengeance Most Fowl is the Wrath of Khan of the Wallace & Gromit universe.)

The setting where our clay heroes live appears to remain frozen in its vaguely mid-20th-century state, but as an embodiment of the eccentric inventor archetype, Wallace got a big update for the 2020s. The central joke about Wallace, the recurring flaw that reveals his character, has always been that he expends more effort in building an absurdly complicated machine that washes, dresses and feeds him than he'd expend in actually washing, dressing and feeding himself. So he presents a useful case scenario for our ongoing discussion about the tasks that people ought to be doing but prefer to delegate to machines.

This time, long-suffering Gromit's cause for consternation du jour is Wallace's invention of programmable garden gnomes. Whereas Gromit keeps a colorful garden that vibrates with life, the robotic gnome turns it into a geometrically perfect nightmare of topiary sameness. The message isn't subtle or original, but our era needs to be reminded of it: automation and standardization are extremely useful for saving time, but they cannot replace the pleasure of deliberate creative choices. As you may recall, one of Gromit's hobbies is knitting. He may take a whole day to finish one sock, while the robotic gnome spits out an entire suit in seconds, which is the opposite of what making your own clothes is about. Results-oriented methods are a bad fit for tasks where having to do an effort is the whole point. (At the meta level, this is an effective argument for the worth of claymation in a world of digital magic.) To stress the same point, the plot has Wallace introduce still another redundant machine: one that pets his dog for him. One would think people don't need to be reminded that interpersonal connection cannot be replaced with machines, but... alas. Such are the times allotted to us.

However, the film doesn't just tell us what we already know. There are more sides to the issue of dangerous machines. When the evil penguin once again hijacks Wallace's invention to turn it against him, the way Wallace wins is by making another machine. That's who he is; that's how he solves all his problems. Even Gromit learns to love the garden gnomes when they help save the day. What's going on?

To understand what Vengeance Most Fowl seems to be saying, it's worthwhile to look more closely at the subplot with the police officers who are trying to recapture the escaped penguin. In a nutshell, we have an experienced senior who has accumulated a vast repertoire of time-tested heuristics (which he calls trusting one's gut) and an enthusiastic rookie who has the textbook fresh in her head and prefers to solve cases by sticking to procedure. Their disagreement mirrors the film's core conflict between spontaneity and algorithm. And yet, it's the rookie cop who figures out the truth by insisting on following the logical rules of evidence (despite her superior believing she listened to her gut). Again: what's going on?

What I suspect is going on is that the opposition between spontaneity and algorithm doesn't need to be resolved, but dissolved. It was never a real opposition. The two need not be enemies. You can pet your dog by yourself while a robotic gnome assists you with the form of gardening you prefer.

This embrace between passion and technique is visible in the very fact that this film exists. Aardman is known for its very high standards of animation quality with immensely complicated materials. One could use computers to animate Wallace & Gromit in a fraction of the time, but the studio's choice to go for the painstaking effort it takes to make inert clay come alive, and make it look no less eye-catching than today's ubiquitous digital creations, is a beautiful demonstration that the medium is the message. Vengeance Most Fowl excels in overcoming unthinkable technical challenges: a dozen tiny gnomes walking in perfect synchrony to carry a van; a boat chase on a navigable aqueduct; an arsenal of boomeranging boots (it makes sense in context).

And then there is, of course, the brilliant choice to give the villain a malleable face that nonetheless stays expressionless no matter what. It's terrifying how we can always tell when he's angry, when he's content, when he's disappointed, when he's defiant, even though his face doesn't move even once. This is a welcome comeback for one of the best characters ever created by Aardman Animation.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

The first Chicken Run set the bar so high that even a subpar sequel is still enjoyable

It's just... OK. It's fine. It tastes like chicken.

Twenty-four years after the incomparably funny Chicken Run, the stars finally aligned for us to get a sequel. There was a brief moment of worry that the award-winning studio Aardman Animations might not be able to keep creating, but all signs indicate it was a false alarm. However, this new entry in the saga of your favorite plasticine chickens with teeth and opposable thumbs doesn't rise to the level of the first. The now free flock have settled on a lake island and founded a prosperous little community, but their leader Ginger's young pullet, Molly, is curious about the outside world, and when she inevitably goes out to explore on her own, the adult chickens must mount a rescue operation, in the middle of which they discover that their old enemy Mrs. Tweedy has returned to the poultry business, this time with all the lethally efficient innovations of industrial farming. Can Ginger save her daughter before she's turned into fast food?

The core conflict in Dawn of the Nugget is basically the same as in the original, and the sensation of sameyness isn't mitigated by the addition of a daughter for the previous protagonist to save, as that particular trope has been done to death. The moment that was supposed to be the most exciting in the movie, the reappearance of Mrs. Tweedy, was unwisely spoiled in the trailer, and the charm of clay animation is lost under the immaculate detail of digital filming. In the "making of" short that accompanies it on the Netflix website, the filmmaking team explain that some digital polishing is always used to remove the lines and spots that naturally occur when reshaping clay hundreds of times in succession, but the finished product suggests that the artists may have gone a bit overboard with the cleanup. Viewers may be forgiven for believing that the whole movie was done in CGI.

The first Chicken Run had numerous scenes set during nighttime or in secluded spaces, which allowed the director to make impressive use of strategically placed shadows that heightened the tension. The persistent threat the hens lived under was portrayed with expressionist skies painted to stark dramatic effect.

The sequel doesn't take advantage of those tools and goes for a more natural look, with clear, open skies and realistic vegetation. The image is almost always too bright, even in spaces that are supposed to be poorly lit. Thus the emotional valence of the movie ends up being consistently cheerful, even when it shouldn't, missing the lingering danger that could be felt throughout the original.

This is not to say that Dawn of the Nugget was badly animated. Far from that: Aardman Animations has decades of impeccable experience with stop-motion techniques, and this movie boasts the same top-tier standard we know to expect from the studio. Camera movements are bolder this time and span large, complicated sets, putting to stringent test the puppeteers' ability to keep the magic hidden outside of the frame. Perhaps the presence of more light forced the post-production team to be more aggressive in hiding the imperfections in the clay, which would explain the sometimes unreal smoothness of the characters.

Unfortunately, the most expertly executed animation cannot make up for an uninspired script. The dialogues, especially between Ginger and her nuclear family, lack the wit and spark of the first movie. Ginger loses big portions of her previous characterization: the tired clichés drawn from every comedy about overprotective parents have her routinely lie to her daughter with the same nonchalance she used to condemn in the rooster Rocky. Dramatic irony is employed in exactly the most predictable manner by turning Ginger into the limiting force she spent most of her life resisting.

The opportunity to continue the Holocaust metaphor is also wasted here. As a descendant of the generation that successfully battled against a regime of prison camps, Molly could have been written as a more interesting kind of teenage rebel. The specific time period when the Chicken Run movies are supposed to happen is hard to pinpoint, but Molly is clearly the token Baby Boomer of the story. (Here I must nitpick for a second: the last scene of Chicken Run showed the freed community raising dozens of newly hatched chicks; it's inexplicable how the sequel seems to imply that Molly is the only young bird on the island.) If you squint, a kind of continuity of theme can be identified in the subtler mechanisms of control that Mrs. Tweedy has implemented in her modernized farm, but the movie is uninterested in the potential for social commentary.

Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget has very few surprises and no memorable lines, and too many overused jokes that will especially disappoint viewers who remember the more biting style of humor of its predecessor. But it's full of eye-catching slapstick and the impossibly convoluted machinery that has become usual in the productions of Aardman Animations. It's every bit as zany and wild as you need claymation to be, and by that sole measure, it excels.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Microreview [film]: The Adventures of Mark Twain

The Meat

If you were alive and creating memories in the United States during 1985/86, you likely remember the craze surrounding Back to the Future, and the craze surrounding Halley's Comet. Bright enough to be seen by the naked eye, Halley's Comet comes around once every 75 years, so for most people it was the only time in their life that the comet would be visible. Of course, some people live long enough at the right time and are able to cross paths with the comet twice. Mark Twain was one of these people, born as the comet appeared in 1835, and dying when it reappeared in 1910.

I remember one Saturday afternoon during or immediately after the comet-o-mania, flipping through the channels and coming across a stop-motion movie about Mark Twain chasing Halley's Comet in a giant airship. I probably saw about thirty minutes from the middle of the movie before the family had to leave and go somewhere, so I never saw the end and never knew what it was called, but I never forgot about it, either. So a few weeks ago when The Adventures of Mark Twain popped up on Netflix, I was both surprised and very, very happy to be able to finally close the loop on this moment from my childhood.

In the film, Tom Sawyer wants to become an "aeronaurt," an outer-space explorer, and when he and Huck Finn see Becky Thatcher at the gala launch of the writer Mark Twain's flying airship, Tom decides he has to get onboard. Twain is going off in pursuit of Halley's Comet, to which he feels cosmically and spiritually bound, and at first he doesn't realize he has stowaways slinking around his magical, proto-steampunk flying colossus. On the ship, the kids are exposed to some of the lesser-known writings of Mark Twain, including The Diary of Adam and Eve, Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven, and The Damned Human Race. All the while, a shadow Twain lurks just off-screen, luring the kids to danger and putting the entire voyage at risk. This shadow Twain is where much of the film's power lies, serving as a metaphor for both Twain himself, and the entire human condition -- the uneasy co-existence of light and dark inside each of us.

Produced and directed by Will Vinton, the stop-motion pioneer who would go on to create the California Raisins animations, the film seems to have almost completely disappeared for 20 years. Wikipedia reports that it was released theatrically in only 7 cities in 1985, and didn't see a video release until 2006. It's a shame. The fact that this film stuck with me for nearly thirty years is a testament to what it accomplishes. The Adventures of Mark Twain is a witty, playful, dark, and thought-provoking film that is a fitting tribute to Twain himself. Animated in clay, it retains a tactile, handmade quality that is more coarse than the stop-motion work that Tim Burton helped popularize subsequently, but also more human and inviting. Twain's was a singular genius, and this film gets him right, which is no small feat.

The Math

Objective Quality: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 for the amazing, and legitimately disturbing, The Damned Human Race segment

Penalties: None

Cult Movie Coefficient: 9/10, very high quality/standout in its category

Click here to read up on our scoring system, and why a "9" is serious business.

Micro Review [Film]: Equinox

Most Friday nights, Turner Classic Movies broadcasts an obscure, cult, or exploitation film as part of its TCM Underground series.

The Meat

Me and Equinox got off to a rocky start. It's not often that The Criterion Collection releases a B-movie, which it did with Equinox, so I was excited to see it pop up on the TCM Underground schedule. But then The Haunted Strangler happened. A late-career Boris Karloff vehicle, the Criterion release of The Haunted Strangler showed up at my house the day before Equinox aired, and I watched with increasing displeasure as this bizarre Karloff movie proceeded to swallow its own tail about 35 minutes in and just get more disjointed and worse from there. Having just been led astray by Criterion, when the first 10 minutes of Equinox proved totally inscrutable, I turned the thing off.

I poked around online to try to find out why this movie had been singled out for special attention, and I got an answer so unexpected that I gleefully waded through the murky (and slow...so, so slow) first 20 minutes of the movie to get to what makes it remarkable. It's definitely not the plot, where four kids go to the woods and...zzz...zzz...zzz...

Sorry. Look, you don't need to know what happens. Here's what's important: Dennis Muren -- the only living filmmaker with 9 Academy Awards to his name, the first visual effects artist to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and a VFX pioneer who worked on five of six Star Wars movies, Terminator 2, and about 25 others -- co-wrote, directed, and created the stop-motion and effects shots in this movie right out of high school, on a budget of $6500. A lovely essay about the whole thing can be found over on the Criterion site. You have to slog through a whole lot of stilted dialogue, terrible ADR looping, exposition, and picnics before you get to it, but the stop-motion animation and other visual trickery that come in the second half of the film more than make it worth your while.

The Math

Objective Quality: 4/10

Bonuses: +1, hybridization of stop-motion and cel animation that no doubt makes Ray Harryhausen proud; +1, Muren's grandfather, who put up the money for the film, appears as the cackling -- and quite well kempt, I must say -- hermit who gives the poor, dumb kids a book of necromancy; +1, launching pad for arguably the most storied VFX career in Hollywood history; +1 for the film's connection to Forrest J. Ackerman and Famous Monsters of Film Land, which helped bring the collaborators together; +1, although not explicitly stated in any interview I could find, this film provided the clear inspiration for much of The Evil Dead, with many 1-for-1 parallels in terms of the magical book/Necronomicon, expository scenes, and animated shots.

Penalties: -1 for the nonsensical bookend narrative device about a reporter unable to find a story in this craziness about the dead kids with their crazy story about devil-worshipping park rangers and inter-dimensional rifts.

Cult Value Coefficient: 8/10

[See explanation of our non-inflated scores here.]