Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
Scott Hardie: “It was ok.”
How bizarre is this movie's existence? Here in 2025 is a feature-length sequel to a 1993 short film, released stateside on a streaming service when the concept of a "streaming service" didn't exist back then, re-casting the lead voice actor who died at age 96 and still didn't live long enough to reprise his role? This movie should not exist nor be marketable, but it does and it is.
I'm aware that the years of labor that it takes to produce stop-motion animation was a factor in the film only coming out now—work started on it pre-pandemic!—and yet this looks too slick and perfect to have been entirely stop-motion animated. I don't know how much CGI (if any?) was used to smooth the motion and enhance the depth of field and add visual details such as floating butterflies, but this movie suspiciously looks sterile and flawless in a way that only CGI looks. Stop-motion is supposed to feel more artisanal because you can (proverbially) see the fingerprints of the artists, but this feels more plastic than Plasticine.
The story is fine, pretty standard business for another Wallace & Gromit outing, sufficient to set up the emotion and jokes that are the real point here. But the story strangely leans heavily on 1993's The Wrong Trousers, right down to callbacks like vehicles being particular colors. I really liked that short film, but I have to wonder, is it popular enough to justify this feature-length sequel? How many kids today will have seen it? How many parents? I don't mind the strong connection between them; I just find it an odd choice to draw so much inspiration from that one long-ago title.
− January 25, 2025 • more by Scott • log in or create an account to reply
Denise Sawicki: I thought it was pretty good, if silly. There have been a few Wallace and Gromit movies up through 2008 though. The Curse of the Were-Rabbit was full length apparently (my addled brain can't even be sure if I've seen that one or not). Also, Chicken Run was somewhat related. − March 26, 2025 • more by Denise
Scott Hardie: True. When I call Vengeance Most Foul a sequel, I'm not ignoring the rest of the W&G series beyond Wrong Trousers, I'm saying that Vengeance Most Foul does. It's not a bad movie at all—I had fun watching it—but I can't stop thinking about the strange choice to make it a follow-up to a decades-old minor installment in the series instead of something new for today's mass audience. The closest analogy that I can think of is 1982's Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which ignored the first Trek film and the rest of the series in order to function almost exclusively as a sequel to the 1967 TV episode "Space Seed." But that movie was a smash hit and remains widely regarded as one of the best Trek productions ever, so what do I know? :-) − March 27, 2025 • more by Scott
Denise Sawicki: Interesting, I would have to rewatch those to see what you mean. To me it held up well without having a current knowledge of things like car colors from The Wrong Trousers. Although, Darrell said his suspension of disbelief in the new movie was broken specifically by the boots acting like boomerangs and not any of the other silly stuff, lol. − March 31, 2025 • more by Denise
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