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by sam regan-edwards
“In fact, at several points I could not tell if I was watching cartoon animation or live action, such are the powers of its animation to simulate live action, to hyperconform to it, seducing it, making it enter the realm of metamorphosis despite itself, even as it simulates and seduces American cartoon animation.” (Alan Cholodenko, Apocalyptic Animation).
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (Park and Crossingham 2024) is corrupt and cynical. It overwrites the art and meaning of stop-motion with an uncritical adoration of CGI in all its meaningless ‘perfection’. Most devilishly, it enacts this change without any sort of transition period—rather, the shift is performed instantaneously and in retrospect. In plot, structure, and production, Vengeance Most Fowl (2024) works to construct a ‘blind spot’ after which everything is always-already digital, and with no way of returning to or accessing a pre-digital understanding of stop-motion.
This article follows from Marian Quigley’s ‘Glocalisation versus Globalisation: The Work of Nick Park and Peter Lord’ (2002), which looks toward an understanding of Aardman (and specifically Chicken Run (Park and Lord 2000) as a machine which produces local specificity on a global scale, not by making the references generic, but by overloading the film(s) with various specific references. As Quigley concludes, “Aardman Animations exemplify the contemporary media-cultural phenomenon that posits the global in the local and the local in the global.” In this way, Chicken Run can be seen as a cynical production of hyperspecific hyperglobal hyperlocal hyperreferences.
My analysis of Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024) also follows from the animatic theory of Alan Cholodenko and Jean Baudrillard, in which the world and its logics are driven to a delirious point of view.
Directly, Vengeance Most Fowl enters into the discourse surrounding the ‘modern’ co-implication of man and technology. Rightly speaking, man’s co-implication with technology is as old as ‘man’ ‘himself’1, given that man is only comprehensible once under the control of language and metaphor, after the leveling of reality by perception. Vengeance Most Fowl (2024) is most concerned with technology’s progression from mere mechanism into automation, from mechanical reproduction into artificial intelligence. This concern is complicated by the impossibility of distinguishing mechanical (re)production and artificial intelligence in hyperreality, in which the intelligence of AI is more intelligent than the artificial and manufactured indifference of the public, but for its troubles is not at all canny2. The intelligence of generative AI is a mechanical reproduction less reproduction than it is the effacement of the idea of reproduction.
The intelligence of generative AI takes the form of a mechanical reproduction whose reproductive apparatus is more interested in the effacement of its own ‘reproduction’ than in the reproduction itself. The result is the pure form of collage in which nothing is referenced nor ‘reproduced’, which comes from nothing by so thoroughly rejecting everything it came from, and so produces meaning by removing from meaning everything that makes meaning mean anything.
Wallace and Gromit enter this discourse with the production of Norbot, the Nifty Odd-Jobbing Robot, who stands for and enacts the computerization of not only the world of Wallace & Gromit, but Aardman’s animation, too.
As can be seen above, Wallace produces Norbot to do Gromit’s gardening for him. Like ‘real-life’ computers, the way Norbot goes about this is to first perceive reality digitally, and comprehend reality as digital. Norbot’s digital ‘reality’ does not see Gromit’s tree in the garden, and so runs over it with a lawnmower as though it is grass, for in Norbot’s digital understanding of the garden, the tree is grass. On a formal level, the film shows the transformation of the tree from tree to grass and from actual to digital in the shot of Norbot mowing the lawn, over the tree, accompanied by CG particle effects of grass being trimmed. The particle effects are not changed by the destruction of the tree, and so in a reality overwritten by the digital, the tree is not only digital but is properly understood, as Norbot understands it, as grass. Thus aligns the perspective of the film with Norbot’s interests.
Figure 1-4: NORBOT turns the tree to grass
Norbot’s interests, and the film’s, are those of Artificial Intelligence. Of the effacement of reality in favour of a reality of effacement. In hypercomprehending gardening and the garden, Norbot has overwritten and replaced the garden and gardening as hypergarden and hypergardening. For Norbot and so for the hyperreality he enforces, gardening is neither a leisure activity (as for Gromit) nor a burden (as for Wallace) but a simple process or performance which must be worked through to give the new world its generic perfection. The film itself strives toward this generic perfection by distancing Wallace and Gromit from the real world by means of empty references that refer to nothing. Norbot has learnt of gardening through “DIY Garden Squad”, a title which (like “News up North”) indicates nothing specific or direct and works to replace the hyperlocal hyperglobal hyperreferences of Chicken Run (2000) with a double effacement of hyperreference. Having already hyperrealised reference through a process of overloading, Aardman goes the one step beyond and overloads Wallace & Gromit with hyper-non-specific hyper-non-references, turning them in to the generic perfection of hyperreality. Where once Wallace spoke of Wensleydale in reference to a specific cheese, now all he alludes to are his own prior references to “Wensleydale”. As Wallace references his own references, his prior references, too, are drawn into the current state of being referenced, forced into the state of hyperreference, into only referring to Wallace’s latter-day references to “Wensleydale”. Vengeance Most Fowl (2024) looks to empty The Wrong Trousers (Park 1993) of all its power by doubling it, drawing it into the realm of double, making it the original of a clone and rejecting the unity and meaning of the original. Feathers McGraw is overloaded with history and myth, no longer an enigmatic figure, Feathers is made metamorphose despite himself into being a hyperDoctor Who and hyperSuperman, whose power is infinite and implied, with skills immediate and without history, exactly necessary and meaning nothing. The Wrong Trousers (1993), like Gromit’s Garden, has been overwritten by Norbot’s hypercomprehension.
Figure 5: Feathers reading to learn in The Wrong Trousers (1993).
Figure 6: Feathers in Vengeance Most Fowl (2024), who already knows everything without needing to learn it.
Figure 7: Wallace in The Wrong Trousers (1993), capable of expression, sculpted imperfectly and covered in the animator’s marks.
Figure 8: Wallace in Vengeance Most Fowl (2024), a Wallace whose ‘imperfections’ are intentional and surface-level, never deviating from the standard inexpressive model of Wallace.
Aardman Animation has itself been written over by the image of Aardman Animation. The presence of fingerprints were once a core aspect of Aardman’s aesthetic design, standing as testament to the human element of their animations—and echoing the documentary audio footage, as in Creature Comforts (Park 1989)—but now the fingerprints only signify the presence of human intervention in the face of films which do all they can to reduce the presence of the human in their production. With the characters now being mostly silicone and the animators being given enough time to remove their presence from the remaining plasticine if wanted, it is only Aardman’s signature stop-motion look that keeps the fingerprints necessary; so the model, once moved perfectly, must be left with the removable imperfection such that the image of Aardman is left intact, even as Aardman obliterates itself through its movement toward perfection. Aardman refers only to itself, working to extract everything meaningful from its prior works through a process of dissection and doubling, of replication and cloning, refusing to leave the body of prior animation alone. Instead this prior work is reanimated through the lifeless double of Vengeance Most Fowl (2024), using The Wrong Trousers (1993) as its energy force. Aardman, like Frankenstein, in its attempt to produce life intentionally has discovered that life is not of the order of intention, it is of the order of accident and chance. To double life creates a doubled life, a life whose life is double and other even to itself. This doubled life has no referent but the ‘original’ that the double shadows and doubles, turning back onto the original and making the original a double of its shadow, a double of its double, and so too only ‘existing’ in relation to ‘itself’, and all that it can turn into itself—including all that it can make digital. The life of Aardman has been doubled and perverted, made metamorphose into a hyperlife of hyperAardman hyperanimation3.
Ben Whitehead, then, who finds himself doubling and “replacing Peter Sallis”4 as the voice of Wallace, reanimates both Wallace and Peter Sallis. Ben Whitehead recalls Peter Sallis to simultaneously reanimate Wallace and rewrite the memory of Sallis as replaceable. No longer can one call Sallis ‘inimitable’, for Whitehead has imitated and been declared “indistinguishable” from Peter Sallis5—bringing Sallis back to life only to declare him redundant. This reanimation and zombification of Peter Sallis suggests a certain acceptability of the zombie. Norbot (who acts not as zombie but as zombifier) having shown his ability and willingness to do evil by freeing the hyperFeathers Mcgraw from prison, having ‘misunderstood’ and digitized reality, having destroyed not only Gromit’s tree but his hobby, who is most powerful when he is able to double and clone himself, is rewarded by being given a home in the garden of Wallace & Gromit. By contrast, when the Wrong Trousers are seen to be capable of evil, they are thrown in the bin (only escaping by their own volition). Somewhere along the line, Aardman became incapable of condemning the rampant progression of technology in hyperreality, of denying Artificial Intelligence priority over humanity, of refusing the promises of eternal life in zombification. Aardman and Norbot now work together, as one, to reanimate and zombify Peter Sallis and The Wrong Trousers, to enter them into Vengeance Most Fowl’s discourse and empty them of everything but their now-empty references. The image of Aardman Animation was once animated by its animations (with their illusions of life), but as Aardman is now only animated by lifeless forces, by Norbot, whose progress is fueled by the destruction of the previously living animations, of the memories of the past, Aardman’s image is animated by zombies, (without containing any illusions of life any longer) Aardman and its image have become zombies.
The zombification of and by Aardman Animation was facilitated and necessitated by the digital. Capitalism no longer deals in use-value, but in the exchanging of signs. In Virtual Reality, signs are limitless, and so too is production (now in its hyper form). Having made a deal with the Netflix, Aardman finds itself already digital, already dealing in signs, and so has already taken on the duty of the digital by the time it comes for Norbot to hyperproliferate and Whitehead to double Sallis. It is the invocation of Feathers McGraw which allows the question of the unoriginality of the double to overshadow the movement from ‘real’ to digital. Vengeance Most Fowl covers its complicity with hyperreality with the promise of narrative satisfaction. This narrative satisfaction is concluded with a boat exploding (doubling and pushing to the limit the derailing train of The Wrong Trousers (1993)) and the question of the legitimacy of Norbot goes up in the explosion – now Norbot was always-already an acceptable entity. Wallace is now always-already accepting of the great evil his inventions commit.
Figure 9: “I knew you’d embrace technology in the end, lad.”
All this is how we get to the final scene of the film, the return to the new normal, in which Gromit’s garden is still overrun by Norbot and his clones, still being hypergardened and attempting ‘perfection’, where Wallace announces that there are “some things a machine just can’t do”, that is, patting Gromit. But Wallace in hyperreality cannot simply return to the patting of the past. Now, Wallace pats with the sense that he has returned to patting, and the patting carries the weight of the symbol of tradition. On the other side, Gromit responds with the image of absolute delight, he melts into it. Why Gromit has moved from his previous indifference to patting can be explained in two ways. Either, Gromit too has been taken in by the demands of hyperreality that require a great reverence for a history we can no longer access, and so performs euphoria in his part of the image of patting that Wallace & Gromit are working to create—creating an image of sanctuary from technological expansion. Or, Gromit has been so hurt by the Pat-O-Matic that he is willing to submit to anything Wallace desires if it means avoiding being patted by machines again. In either case, this is not a return to the previous state of patting, rather is a collusion to create an image of respite from the domination of reality by hyperreality (which is itself an acceptance and continuation of hyperreality). The second motion which undoes the statement, “There are some things a machine just can’t do”, is in the clink of the teacups. Earlier, the teapot had been set up as a figure of the analogue traditions forgotten by today’s technology-obsessed Wallace, and so the re-emergence of the teapot-tea signifies the return to tradition. However, like the patting, the tea, too, has been contaminated by hyperreality, by CG, and has been animated not by the traditional approach—frame-by-frame in plasticine—but by 3D computer animation software simulating fluid dynamics. And so the return to the good old days, to Wallace’s suspicion of technology, is merely a ‘return’ to the aesthetic of suspicion, forgetting what it means to be suspicious of technology, where the references have become hyperreferences, the gardening become hypergardening, the patting become hyperpatting, and the ‘tea’ which was once coloured cling film become CG.
Figure 10: Gromit pouring cling-film tea in The Wrong Trousers (1993).
Figure 11: Wallace and Gromit clinking computer-generated tea in Vengeance Most Fowl (2024).
Figure 12: “AI, lad! See how embracing technology makes our lives better.” – Wallace in Vengeance Most Fowl.
Stop-motion is dead, now only ever always-already doubled and reanimated by CGI.
Bibliography:
BAUDRILLARD, Jean. The Intelligence of Evil or The Lucidity Pact, trans CHRIS Turner. Oxford:Berg.
CHOLODENKO, Alan. 2007. ‘Speculations on the Animatic Automaton’. In Alan
CHOLODENKO(ed.). The Illusion of Life II : More Essays on Animation. Sydney N.S.W., Australia: Power Publications, pp. 486 – 528.
CHOLODENKO, Alan. 2014. ‘Apocalyptic Animation: In the Wake of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Godzilla and Baudrillard’. In International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. Volume 11, Number 2.
MZIMBA, Lizo. 2024. Wallace & Gromit without Peter Sallis is ’emotional’ says Nick Park. At: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce8x6z3mp1eo
QUIGLEY, Marian. 2002. ‘Glocalisation versus Globalisation: The Work of Nick Park and Peter Lord’. In Animation Journal. Volume 10.
REGAN-EDWARDS, Sam. 2023. Speculations on the Animatic Oberzan. At: https://spark23.co.uk/zachary-oberzan/
WIKIPEDIA. 2024. Ben Whitehead. At: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Whitehead
Filmography:
PARK, Nick. 1989. Creature Comforts.
PARK, Nick. 1989. Wallace & Gromit: A Grand Day Out.
PARK, Nick. 1993. Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers
PARK, Nick and Merlin CROSSINGHAM. 2024. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.
List of Figures:
Figures 1. PARK, Nick and Merlin CROSSINGHAM. 2024. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. [Film still.]
Figures 2. PARK, Nick and Merlin CROSSINGHAM. 2024. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. [Film Still.]
Figures 3. PARK, Nick and Merlin CROSSINGHAM. 2024. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. [Film Still.]
Figures 4. PARK, Nick and Merlin CROSSINGHAM. 2024. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. [Film Still.]
Figures 5. PARK, Nick. 1993. Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers. [Film Still.]
Figures 6. PARK, Nick and Merlin CROSSINGHAM. 2024. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. [Film Still.]
Figures 7. PARK, Nick. 1993. Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers. [Film Still.]
Figures 8. PARK, Nick and Merlin CROSSINGHAM. 2024. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. [Film Still.]
Figures 9. PARK, Nick and Merlin CROSSINGHAM. 2024. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. [Film Still.]
Figures 10. PARK, Nick. 1993. Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers. [Film Still.]
Figures 11. PARK, Nick and Merlin CROSSINGHAM. 2024. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. [Film Still.]
Figures 12. PARK, Nick and Merlin CROSSINGHAM. 2024. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. [Film Still.]
Notes:
1 For more on man’s co-implication with technology, see Cholodenko’s Speculations on the Animatic Automaton, which analyses and elaborates upon Bolter’s Turing Man: “Bolter argues that Man can only know himself and his image of the universe in terms of such technologies, which define the human, human body, mind or brain. In classical times, it was the clay pot or spindle; for Descartes, it was the clock; and in modern times, it is the computer” (2007: 488). For the argument that metaphor is the defining technology of man, see my Speculations on the Animatic Oberzan (2023).
2 See Baudrillard’s The Intelligence of Evil or The Lucidity Pact, especially the chapter “The Destruction of the Golden Temple”, in which he writes: “What the tyranny of Artificial Intelligence leads to most surely is the birth of a previously unknown stupidity – artificial stupidity – deployed everywhere on the screens and in the computer networks.” (2005: 178)
3 This hyperrealising of Aardman extends even to the credits, which in Vengeance Most Fowl (2024) contain the artifacts of motion compensated frame interpolation—meaning that half of the credits’ frames have been AI generated, which for me (outlined in my article The interpolated frame; or digital precognition and the replacement of motion and following from Baudrillard’s The Intelligence of Evil or The Lucidity Pact, and most directly the chapters “The Mental Diaspora of the Networks” and “The Violence Done to the Image”) halts the meaning of the credits in their tracks, returning the image-ness of the credits to the credits, only by visibly producing a lack of image in the image, and making of the image of the credits a meaningless hyperimage (of the hypercredits).
4 From Ben Whitehead’s Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Whitehead
5 From Lizo Mzimba’s article Wallace & Gromit without Peter Sallis is ’emotional’ says Nick Park (2024) talking to Ben Whitehead: “”You kind of have to do the ‘hmm’ and the ‘hee-hee’,” [Whitehead] continues – demonstrating some Wallace-isms that sound indistinguishable from Peter Sallis’s Yorkshire tones.” And quoting Nick Park: “”He’s stepped in very kindly, and is just great. It’s hard to tell them apart.””
