DAN WEBSTER:
When the Academy Award winners are announced during Sunday’s broadcast, some movie fans are likely to pay special attention to the Best Animated Feature category. That’s because two production teams that once shared an Academy Award are now, 19 years later, in competition.
It was in 2005 that the British studio Aardman Animations partnered with the U.S. company DreamWorks Animation to make the feature film The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Directed (with Steve Box) by Nick Park, creator of the Wallace & Gromit series, the film went on to win the 2006 Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
But apparently the experience didn’t sit well with the British filmmaker Park, who reportedly chafed at the many attempts by DreamWorks to make the film more palatable to American audiences. Whatever the truth of that, the fact is that both companies—DreamWorks and Aardman—have films among the five nominated for this year’s top animated prize.
DreamWorks’ entry is The Wild Robot, a film directed by Chris Sanders and co-written by Sanders and Peter Brown. Aardman’s is Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, co-directed by Park and Merlin Crossingham from a script co-written by Park, Mark Burton and Holly Walsh.
Both films are available for home viewing through various streaming services, with Netflix having snared the rights to Park’s stop-action feature. While The Wild Robot is based on the 2016 novel of the same name by Peter Brown, Park’s film is part of a series that dates back to the late 1980s.
In fact, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is the sixth film featuring the clever-if-bumbling inventor Wallace (voiced by Ben Whitehead) and his far-more-sensible mute dog Gromit. In addition to Curse of the Were-Rabbit having won an Oscar, two of the Wallace & Gromit short films—1994’s The Wrong Trousers and 1996’s A Close Shave—also won Oscar gold. (Park won a fourth Oscar in 1991 for the short Creature Comforts.
Vengeance Most Fowl is a return to classic Wallace & Gromit, with the intrepid duo living together in a house full of—and in a certain sense run by—Wallace’s inventions. With Gromit simply pushing a button, Wallace is pulled from his bed, bathed, dressed and deposited at his kitchen table where he is served toast with jam.
All seems well, though reality quickly asserts itself in the form of unpaid bills. The solution? An invention, of course, which turns out to be a robotic garden gnome that Wallace dubs Norbot. And the do-everything gnome gets busy, turning Gromit’s garden into something that—to the dog’s horror—is more of an art exhibit than anything remotely natural. “Neat and tidy,” Norbot squeals.
Yet the neighbors take notice, and soon Wallace is sending Norbot out for hire, mowing a lawn here, installing a deck there, well on the way to earning the money that Wallace needs to get out of debt.
Yet when an enterprising television reporter makes Wallace the subject of a news story, it attracts the attention of an old foe: the mastermind Feathers McGraw, whose crimes in The Wrong Trousers put him behind prison bars.
Yet the determined McGraw is able to hack into Wallace’s home computer and both transform the good Norbot into something evil while creating dozens of Norbot clones. All are soon wreaking havoc on the neighborhood and attracting the attention of Chief Inspector Albert Mackintosh (voiced by Peter Kay) and PC Mukherjee (voiced by Lauren Patel), who assume that Wallace has created the robots simply to steal.
The usual Nick Park hijinks ensue, involving Wallace’s clueless behavior and Gromit—whose simple face is amazingly expressive—always coming to the rescue. Gromit’s good sense is especially needed as they face off with McGraw who is intent on stealing (actually re-stealing) the valuable Blue Diamond.
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl has already won a trio of British Academy Awards, so losing on Sunday shouldn’t be too much of a disappointment. Considering Park’s past dissatisfaction with DreamWorks, though, a win just might give him a special sense of satisfaction.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio and a blogger for Spokesman.com.