The final round of Oscar voting has commenced, and in the running for Best Animated Feature is Aardman with their second Wallace and Gromit feature, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. This comes 19 years after Nick Park and Steve Box put bowties on their statuettes on stage after winning for the inventor-dog duo’s first feature adventure, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. It’s been 20 years since Wallace got the Hammer horror treatment and turned into a very large (and, admittedly, very cute) were-rabbit who torments their small, sleepy Northern English town by eating all their vegetables. In the time since, we’ve only seen one short from the Wallace and Gromit franchise, but it was worth the wait. Vengeance Most Fowl, despite needing to cast Ben Whitehead as Wallace due to the death of the great Peter Sallis, proves this beloved animated world hasn’t lost any of its spark.
Collider talks again to Vengeance Most Fowl’s directors Merlin Crossingham and Nick Park on their Oscar win, what Gromit would sound like if he talked, where Feathers McGraw is now, and why we likely won’t see a love interest of Wallace or Gromit’s stick around for very long.
Aardman Is Nominated For Another Oscar For ‘Vengeance Most Fowl’

“I was on Zoom with Merlin and the whole gang raising a glass.”

COLLIDER: I want to start off by saying huge congratulations on the Oscar nomination. Where were you guys when you found out, and how did you celebrate?
MERLIN CUNNINGHAM: I was at the studio in Bristol. I was in the canteen, and there were a whole bunch of people who’d worked on the film with us there. We had it on our laptop. We were watching, actually, on the phone to start with, but I couldn’t hold the phone steady because I was nervous, and so someone got their laptop out. And then a hush came down, and then a huge cheer went up when we got the nomination. So, it was a lovely feeling.
NICK PARK: At the same time, I was up north in Lancashire with my wife. We were streaming it from the Academy in the same way on the computer. A massive hurrah went up in the middle of Lancashire, and then a moment later, I was on Zoom with Merlin and the whole gang raising a glass.
As you should! Nick, when you won for [Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the] Were-Rabbit when you were up with Steve Box, you put little bow ties on the statuette. I was wondering, is there any chance we could get a red glove on the statuettes this time around?
PARK: [Laughs] We’ll have to talk about that.
Continue the tradition! I wanted to start off with a little quickfire of what you think Wallace and Gromit’s tastes and interests would be if they lived in our real world today.
PARK: They do live in our real world.
Oh, obviously, but I think that there are some questions that need answers. This is a very personal question for Brits. We see Wallace and Gromit drink a lot of tea. What do you think is their favorite tea brand?
PARK: Well, I could say Yorkshire, but that would be the wrong county.
CUNNINGHAM: We did actually make a commercial for PG Tips after Were-Rabbit. That was actually one of the very first things I ever directed on my own. Have we got any brand alliances at the moment? [Laughs] I think the answer is, regardless of brand, it would be a good, strong cup of tea.
If Wallace and Gromit had a shared Spotify account, who do you think their top artist would be?
CUNNINGHAM: Doggy Osmond.
PARK: The Hound of Music.
CUNNINGHAM: Gromit likes Bark.
PARK: Yeah, he does like Bark.
CUNNINGHAM: What would Wallace listen to? They would probably be in quite poor taste, so we probably better not say who.
PARK: T Bone Burnett.
There are a lot of Bond references throughout Vengeance Most Fowl, and I was wondering which Bond actor do you think are Wallace and Gromit’s favorite, or which era of Bond do you think that they would love to watch?
PARK: I think DIY Another Day would certainly be a title. Or No Time to DIY.
CUNNINGHAM: But it would be the [Sean] Connery era, do you think?
PARK: Or Roger Moore’s cheesy.
CUNNINGHAM: He is cheesy.
PARK: Wallace would prefer Roger Moore. Probably Gromit a bit more Sean Connery, wouldn’t he, with a bit more taste?
A Foreign TV Channel Gave Gromit a Voice

“Some foreign TV station decided to dub Gromit.”

Image Via Netflix

Gromit, obviously, doesn’t speak, and that’s part of him, but have you ever thought about what he would sound like in his own thoughts?
CUNNINGHAM: Didn’t someone put a voice on him once?
PARK: Yeah, somebody. I don’t know if it’s Denmark, but it was somewhere…
CUNNINGHAM: Latvia or Scandinavia.
PARK: It could have been Sweden. Or Finland, even. I don’t want to accuse anyone, but it was a long time ago, in the early ‘90s. Some foreign TV station decided to dub Gromit.
Did they write in dialogue for him that wasn’t in the original?
CUNNINGHAM: Yeah, that’s right.
PARK: We didn’t know until afterwards, but they dubbed it for TV.
CUNNINGHAM: But we always think of Gromit as having an internal dialogue. When we are thinking about what he’s doing, we’re always talking about what he’s thinking and what would he say in this situation, or, “Oh, Wallace, not again,” kind of thing. So we were always conscious of that. I mean, it’s loose. It’s not like, “This is what he would say.” It’s, “This is what he’s thinking.” It’s a general kind of thought process.
PARK: Often, when we’re directing the animators who are like actors to us, we often rehearse things on video. We film ourselves doing the action to try and find ourselves what it is and we’ve got something to talk about to the animator. To do that, as Merlin says, we often have to say dialogue. When Gromit’s acting, if he goes like, “What? Eh? What was that?” Or something like that, it helps to get the actions just right, like the eye movements and everything.
That makes total sense. Do you do the same for Feathers McGraw and all the non-speaking characters?
PARK: We do, actually, yeah. Although, Feathers is a little bit more abstract. He’s a lot more mysterious, so it tends to be based on quite simple matters of timing.
CUNNINGHAM: It certainly helps.
Where Is Feathers McGraw Now?

“He said, “Don’t call us. We’ll call you.”

Image Via Netflix

Speaking of Feathers, I think people have been so delighted that he’s back, and also he gets away in the end. Are you setting it up for Feathers to have another day, do you think? Where do you think he’s gone now on the train?
PARK: It’s somewhere in the Yorkshire at the moment. Stuck in Yorkshire! Who knows? He’s so mysterious that he hasn’t told us what he’s doing yet.
CUNNINGHAM: He said, “Don’t call us. We’ll call you.”
PARK: So no real plans at the moment.
This story is very much a discussion of AI, modern technology, and how it affects society. But one of my colleagues noticed that we still don’t see smartphones and iPads and those types of devices infiltrating the story. Is that a purposeful decision? Why do we not see, I don’t know, Wallace scrolling on his phone or something like that?

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‘Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl’ Review: Aardman’s Beloved Duo Is Back on Top

Feathers McGraw steals the show in this safe but fun return to form.

PARK: Yeah, it is a conscious decision.
CUNNINGHAM: It was very conscious.
PARK: All the things we do. Even though in this film we have become a bit more contemporary with AI, we still keep it in a Wallace and Gromit world style.
CUNNINGHAM: It’s like a time gone by, isn’t it? It’s a non-specific time gone by where things are chunky and old and more mechanical. So even the debate of having computers with keyboards and screens, we were worried that that was even too modern, but we really needed it in the story. So, making sure they looked old and historic technology was important.
PARK: Mark Burton, the screenwriter, was just saying earlier how he loves the way that it’s all the nostalgic world of Wallace and Gromit. It’s still very much the same and intact, but with that, you can still say very contemporary. You can have contemporary messages in that, which was very clever of him.
CUNNINGHAM: One thing that people often say is that Wallace and Gromit sort of have a timeless feel about them, and I think it’s partly because nothing ages faster than the present day. They’re not in the present day. They are already from a time slightly gone by then. They’re already slightly from the past, and I think that’s one of the things that helps them.
Lauren Patel’s P.C. Mukherjee Is One of Wallace & Gromit’s Best New Characters

“She was a bit of a force of nature, really.”

Image Via Netflix

This film is so referential of the past. You’re bringing back old characters, but you still find a lovely way to make it feel new and fresh. I do want to give a shoutout to Lauren Patel as P.C. Mukherjee because she quickly became one of my favorite characters in the franchise. I think she’s so brilliant. What went into her characterization?
CUNNINGHAM: We were talking with Mark about it just earlier, actually. The whole relationship with the police, not just with themselves but within the story, was a really tricky one to get right.
PARK: She was like a comic foil for him being the old-fashioned, almost retiring type. She was a great kind of new blood. She was a bit of a force of nature, really.
CUNNINGHAM: We needed her to be there to question him because his moral compass was slightly off, and so she needed to be there as the questioning voice in that police world. We loved the way that Lauren’s voice sounded. Her voice has an amazing presence, and she can be innocent, she can be funny, but she can also then step up and be questioning and has a great range. We did try some other performers, but hers just clicked. It was quite obvious when we heard her.
PARK: Getting her just right in terms of being this questioning of Mac, but also funny was a real challenge, actually. That’s when we worked with Holly and Barunka. Holly Walsh and Barunka came in to help get the comedy right for this new female character in a more contemporary kind of way.
She’s amazing, and I feel like it’s even a bigger feat because you’re asking her to go toe to toe with Peter Kay, a comedy icon. The two of them together, you probably wouldn’t think that there’s chemistry between just voice actors, but they do really bring a lot of voice chemistry.
CUNNINGHAM: Yeah, they do. And the weird thing is that we didn’t actually record them together, either. They never actually met in person when they were recording. Between us, we had to make sure that it sounded like it was a coherent conversation.
PARK: And on the comedy side, too, where Holly and Barunka helped was that she wasn’t just feeding lines to the male character but was funny in herself, and that was really important to get that right.
Feather McGraw’s Baby Seal Is One of Cinema’s Cutest Pets

“We call him Ron Seal”

Image Via Netflix

From what I’ve been seeing online about people’s favorite little bits of the film is Feathers McGraw’s pet baby seal. Were you expecting that to have such a warm reception?
PARK: Yes! I know. He kind of stayed in it all the way through.
CUNNINGHAM: It was one of those jokes that was there right from the beginning.
PARK: We actually had a name for the baby seal, which was never credited because we couldn’t clear copyright, but we call him Ron Seal.
CUNNINGHAM: Halfway through production, someone found an actual soft toy seal that was quite big, and he’d sit on the sofa with us in edit, and he was our seal of approval. So, we would always ask him if we should do this edit or not.
PARK: He may be coming to the Oscars. We don’t know.
Aardman Is Currently Working on New Pokémon and Pingu Series

“From what we’ve seen, it looks amazing.”

People would very much support that. And I think for a lot of people who know their Aardman, we know that you’re reviving Pingu, and I think a lot of people’s favorite character from Pingu is Robby the Seal. Do we think that we could see a bit of a return of maybe Robby now that he has a family now in the new Wallace & Gromit?
CUNNINGHAM: Oh, I don’t know. We’re not involved in that.
PARK: No, we haven’t been. But it’s a wonderful franchise. I loved it since I was quite little. But now we’ve got a clash of penguins.
CUNNINGHAM: They’ll very much stay in their own kind of…
PARK: In their own worlds.
Are you guys involved in the work Pokémon is doing with Aardman?
CUNNINGHAM: We’re not. No. That’s been running alongside. We’ve been so deep in making this film. From what we’ve seen, it looks amazing.
PARK: It’s got some great people on it.
CUNNINGHAM: I think that’s going to be an absolute smash when it comes out.
Do you think we’ll have to wait as long a time for another Wallace & Gromit feature film as we did? Do you think it’ll be another 20 years?
PARK: It’s hard to get our brains around this at the moment because it’s been nonstop on this one a bit.
CUNNINGHAM: Give us a chance to have a lie down. Lie down, and then…
PARK: There are always more ideas with Wallace and Gromit. So, watch this space.
When you did the Q&A with Steve, he asked about a possible Chicken Run crossover. Do you think that could be something that we’ll see?
CUNNINGHAM: I don’t think so.
PARK: We don’t tend to mix up our worlds. The farmer from Shaun the Sheep did a cameo, but we only do it if it’s like a joke or something. But we wouldn’t really mix up their worlds.
Bringing Gromit and Ginger together, though, I feel like they could take over the world or something.
PARK: That would be surreal, though, wouldn’t it? A talking chicken. She’d be bigger than Gromit. You’d have to do a scale. He can’t quite understand Ginger speaking. You get into all sorts of… It’s like time-traveling dilemmas.
Will Wallace or Gromit Ever Find Love?

“Relationships tend to be a bit doomed.”

Image Via BBC

Now that Feathers has been brought back and it was such a success, is there another character that you guys personally would love to bring back, or do you have a favorite side character out of the entire franchise?
CUNNINGHAM: The only one sort of fan-wise is Fluffles, isn’t it?
PARK: No one’s mentioned her until recently.
CUNNINGHAM: No, it’s a quite recent thing. We’ve had feedback from fans saying, “Oh, it would be amazing if Fluffles came back!” But I think generally, led by you, [Nick], really, is to try and always come up with new villains or new characters. This has been a bit of an exception to the rule, really, bringing Feathers back.
PARK: Yes, and we didn’t set out to bring Feathers back.
CUNNINGHAM: Or Mac.
PARK: It was more that we had the story idea, and those characters seemed incredibly appropriate and were a great help to solve story issues.
CUNNINGHAM: So I guess going forward, if we have the same model, it’s if the story requires it, we’ll certainly consider it.
I was really hoping for a Gromit romance, and Wallace, as well. I know he’s been through a lot Bake-O-Lite girl.
PARK: I’m not saying no, but the problem with any love interest for any of the characters, it’s always been the case that they can never carry on because it’s Wallace and Gromit are the married couple. Relationships tend to be a bit doomed.
They’re the love story!
CUNNINGHAM: They are the love story.
PARK: It is really true. That’s what this film was about.

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

Release Date

January 3, 2025

Runtime

79 minutes

Director

Nick Park

Writers

Mark Burton

Producers

Claire Jennings

Reece Shearsmith

Norbot (voice)

Ben Whitehead

Wallace (voice)

Peter Kay

Chief Inspector Albert Mackintosh (voice)

Diane Morgan

Up North News Reporter (voice)