No, this is not about Trump retribution vileness.
It’s a 2024 film (on Netflix) in Britain’s “Wallace & Gromit” series. Wallace is a middle-aged small-time inventor, of household contraptions (typical is a retracting mechanical arm to insert his breakfast toast into his mouth). Gromit is his pooch, and immensely smarter.
Wallace’s latest is Norbot, a cheerful singing motorized garden gnome for home and yard jobs. Feathers McGraw, a previous W&G villain, is a master criminal penguin incarcerated in a zoo. Until he manages to access a computer (don’t ask), and remotely reprograms Norbot to make an army of evil clones that help McGraw not only escape, but steal the famed Blue Diamond. With Wallace framed as the culprit.
Crime and Punishment this is not. But never mind the silly plot, it’s hugely entertaining. All in the rich visual shtick and jokes.
The film was quite a few years in the making. Because it’s claymation. Not the latest technology using AI or digitalized animation — instead it’s all figures made of clay whose positions must be painstakingly rejiggered to shoot each individual frame — thousands and thousands. It’s hard to fathom how the auteurs could even manage the logistics of portraying often wild, even airborne, gyrations. Anyhow, all crazily time-consuming. But clearly here a labor of love.
And far more effective than it might sound. So visually engaging one forgets this is clay. So much cleverness and humor its entertainment never flags.
He’s reading “A Room of One’s Own”
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One example of the exceptional artistry on display is Gromit’s eyes. Just two white balls with central spots. Yet it’s astonishing how much emotional range the film makers manage to impart into those eyes.
Another character is chipper young female police officer Mukherjee, of Indian ancestry, coping with her old-school chief’s stodginess. Veddy veddy British there, evoking Arthur Conan Doyle. Then there’s McGraw escaping from the zoo in a submarine, built by Norbots. A brief flash of him at a piano in the sub is a cute homage to Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo!
Thanks to intrepid and resourceful Gromit (of course), with some impossible feats and literal cliff-hangers, McGraw is ultimately foiled, the diamond recovered, Mukherjee and Wallace vindicated, and the Norbots reprogrammed. But McGraw seemingly absconds, perhaps to see another day.
Let’s hope so.
