Wallace, Gromit and the zoo
I’m looking forward to Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, a film slated for a Christmas release. It’s the latest entry in a long-running franchise about a British inventor and his anthropomorphic dog. The stop-motion series, created by Nick Park and produced by Aardman Animations, currently consists of four shorts and one feature, among other things.
When I was in middle school, I wanted to be a stop-motion animator. I was influenced by the television show Celebrity Deathmatch and the video game ClayFighter 63⅓, but, above all, I was inspired by Wallace & Gromit. I can’t imagine having the patience for stop-motion work these days. Still, Aardman Animations’ comedic franchise holds a special place in my heart.
The trailer for the studio’s upcoming feature, Vengeance Most Fowl, reveals the film’s antagonist is a returning character, Feathers McGraw. McGraw is another human-like animal, in this case, a penguin. We eventually learn he is an escapee from a local zoo. On the run, the criminal mastermind disguises himself as a chicken by wearing a red, rubber glove on his head.
I decided to rewatch the short in which he originally appeared, 1993’s The Wrong Trousers. It was co-written and directed by Park. The 29-minute movie won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. I feel as if I should periodically mention, when I look at art from an animal-rights perspective, that I don’t think cultural criticism is important for activists. I do it for fun.
In The Wrong Trousers, McGraw rents a bedroom from the inventor, Wallace, much to the dismay of his dog, Gromit, who is displaced by the interloper. The penguin, disguised as a chicken, uses one of Wallace’s creations, a pair of techno-trousers, to steal a diamond from a nearby museum. The inventor and his canine companion capture McGraw and turn him over to the police.
In the final moments of the film, we see the penguin behind bars. As the camera zooms out, these are revealed to be the bars of a zoo enclosure. It’s a little unfortunate. This puts the viewers in the position of having rooted for an animal to be placed into a fundamentally exploitative institution, whatever small gestures a zoo might make toward alleviating conservationist concerns.
On the other hand, the movie is equating zoos with prisons. Prisons, obviously, are restrictive places of punishment, where most people would not like to live. That’s certainly not how defenders of zoos want such institutions to be perceived by the public, though I think it’s accurate. I assume Park had no political motivation here and only sought to make an animal-themed joke.
Peter Sallis, who plays Wallace, is the sole voice actor on the film, as Gromit and McGraw are silent. The English performer passed away in 2017. In Vengeance Most Fowl, he will be replaced by Ben Whitehead, who has apparently played Wallace in video games and been an occasional stand-in for Sallis in movies. I’m excited about the upcoming feature.