Wallace and Gromit Films Ranked
4. Vengeance Most Fowl (2024)
The second feature film in the franchise, Vengeance Most Fowl, comes after the longest break between entries in the series’ history. In this film, Wallace’s new invention, an AI-powered gardening Smart-Gnome named Norbot, helps Wallace to set up a new home-improvement company to try and pay for the bills, allowing him to continue inventing. However, the arch-enemy of the pair has heard of the invention, and hatches a grand, evil plan to fuel his return.
As the sixth entry in the franchise, you would expect Aardman to have nailed down the formula for a Wallace and Gromit film, and so it seems here. Complete with big homages to Batman Returns and Skyfall, the film does everything you might expect of a legacy sequel. It has got heart and humour and still manages to have a few creepy moments, including references to The Birds and Final Destination. The jokes are good, the personality is maintained, and the finale is big enough to be worthy of a feature film.
If the franchise ends here, it would be a worthy ending. The legacy sequel puts everything beloved from the other films together, throws in homages to itself, and finishes with a big hug to itself from its two leads. Despite it not quite having the same true magic as the other films, and some of the jokes being subject to possibly aging badly, it is a film about itself, and about its place in film in the rise of artificial intelligence; a bold step for the franchise. And yet it’s still very funny, very off-kilter, very English, and very human. Even if its not right at the top of the list, it’s still incredibly good. Brains and entertainment is tricky in today’s world, but Vengeance Most Fowl pulls it off.
3. A Close Shave (1995)
Shaun the Sheep is probably more well-known to the general public, especially to American audiences, than Wallace and Gromit. Still, he had to begin somewhere, and he gets his origin in the 1995 short, the third of the original trilogy of short films, A Close Shave.
Starting a franchise tradition of beginning a business enterprise thanks to the duo’s inventions, the window-washing team meet Wendy, a young woman running a wool shop with her dog. Strangely, she seems to be the only one doing OK for wool, as there’s a spate of sheep-rustling going on nearby. When Wallace and Gromit investigate, they discover something far more sinister than they could have ever suspected.
A Close Shave takes the first two films, and, off the back of The Wrong Trousers winning an Oscar, dials the ambition up to eleven.
The first two films had only three characters apiece, whereas this film throws in a whole flock of sheep in the middle of a countryside motorbike-and-sidecar chase sequence. The finale throws in plot twists and goes horrifically dark. The animators have reached peak performance by now. Everything looks incredible. The camerawork is pristine. It’s a glorious film. There is a reason that Shaun became a household favourite; he’s a great sidekick for Gromit, becoming a protégé for him, and adds to the heartfelt, campy insanity of the universe.
Perhaps the finale is a little cramped, and needed a little more room to properly show off the true villain of the piece – at 31 minutes it still has nine minutes of wiggle-room to be allowed for the Oscar nomination, which it rightfully won anyway.
Even with this, A Close Shave remains a fun outing for the pair of inventors, and a half-hour blast of animation creativity, with some memorable scenes and an excuse for a ton of sidecar sales.
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