Very British Animals

There’s always be an England, at least for Wallace and Gromit or Paddington Bear.

Gromit, the hardest-working dog on West Wallaby Street, commonly has one ear cocked for the least tremor of trouble, but he hasn’t noticed any change in his master’s voice. Which is hardly his fault: Peter Sallis, the original Wallace, died in 2017, but his successor Ben Whitehead supplies the requisite slow, baffled Northern intonations very convincingly (Sallis was a Londoner, by the way: at least Whitehead’s dad was from Cheshire). Almost everything else is equally, reassuringly as anticipated in Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, directed by Nick Park in collaboration with Merlin Crossingham: the second feature-length vehicle for the claymation mascots of Aardman Studios—originally created by Park, an Aardman lifer, while he was still at film school in the 1980s—and their first proper adventure of any sort since A Matter of Loaf and Death in 2008.

Given how long they’ve been gone, a recap for convenience’ sake: Wallace is a bubble-nosed suburban bachelor fond of tea, toast and above all cheese, set in his ways in every respect aside from the Rube Goldberg inventions he builds compulsively. Gromit is the real brains of the outfit, a four-legged Figaro capable of astonishing feats of derring-do on behalf of the largely oblivious Wallace, to whom he remains inexplicably loyal (doggedly so, you might say—and the pun-loving team at Aardman probably would). Though speechless in the conventional sense, he’s not short on ways to express himself: chiefly his finely-drawn yet emphatic eyebrows, regularly raised in incredulity or lowered in dismay.

While time might appear to have passed this duo by, in truth they were wilfully cut off from any specific era at the outset, all the better to induce a sense of inexplicably deep familiarity in young and old alike. Park has spoken of drawing on his actual childhood in 1960s Lancashire, but equally there’s no doubting his debt to the imaginary England of Ealing comedies—cosy throwbacks even in their day—or to the subsequent tamed surrealism of The Goodies (despite my long-held suspicions, it seems he got started just too soon to owe anything to Inspector Gadget, which also teamed a bumbling technophile with a savvy non-verbal dog). Having laid the groundwork over the decades, Aardman in the 2020s are able to trade largely on nostalgia for themselves—and for the innately lo-fi medium of stop-motion animation, however far they’ve come technically from the early days when visible thumbprints were part of the charm.

Once you’ve been going long enough, though, certain difficulties arise: when your brand is quaintness, how do you manage to move with the times should this be required? The question is at the heart of Vengeance Most Fowl, which like other recent Aardman productions makes discreet use of CGI, while striving to retain the appearance of emerging from a cottage industry staffed with eccentric tinkerers. Just such a tinkerer is Wallace himself, who has turned his ingenious mind and enormous hands to the creation of an AI-powered garden gnome named Norbot (Reece Shearsmith), a rosy-cheeked, chittering abomination who takes over most of Gromit’s chores and soon has the backyard looking spick and span, if alarmingly free of flowers.

This prompts the usual amount of brow-furrowing from Gromit, who has a way of getting quietly frantic whenever he’s at risk of losing Wallace’s attention, though for a change his rival isn’t a flesh-and-blood woman (there have been several in Wallace’s life; the last one turned out to be a serial killer). Things go from bad to worse through the intervention of beady-eyed penguin gangster Feathers McGraw, still locked up at the zoo where we left him at the close of The Wrong Trousers way back in 1993. From the safety of his enclosure, he manages to hack into Norbot’s mechanical brain and throw the switch to evil, launching an intricate plot involving an entire gnome army, a submarine traversing the local sewers, and the legendary Blue Diamond, scheduled to return at long last to public display.

Technology run rampant has its dangers: who knew? Still, Park and company are no more Luddites than Wallace himself, and Norbot has his default settings restored in time to play an honourable part in the chase climax; while this may have only half the rizz of the one in The Wrong Trousers, a purist refusal of digital shortcuts would hardly help to recapture the other half, which arose from our knowledge that the filmmakers had no choice but to go the long way round. Separately, it’s noteworthy that the supporting cast includes more non-white faces than have been visible till now in W&G’s plasticine Wigan, and that the sharpest satire is reserved for a stick-in-the-mud copper (Peter Kay) whose youthful sidekick (Lauren Patel) has to school him in modern policing principles such as collecting evidence and basing arrests on more than gut feeling alone. Some eras merit mourning, some kinds of progress can’t come soon enough. But in the end, man and dog get home in time for tea.

Managing change is also the keynote of Paddington in Peru, in which Paddington Bear, voiced once again by Ben Whishaw, finds himself sharing his London home with a new foster mother. As with the recasting of Wallace, this goes unremarked within the fiction—but interested observers can hardly fail to note that Sally Hawkins, a ray of sunshine in the previous two Paddington films, has been replaced as Mrs Brown by Emily Mortimer, who’s more of a light drizzle (this is meant descriptively, not unkindly, though some kids may resist the suggestion that one mum is as good as another). Paddington’s human siblings, who have not been recast, are meanwhile taking their first steps into adulthood; Paddington himself is still cub-sized, and seems fated to remain so indefinitely.

No explanation is given for his arrested development, not shared by his ursine relatives—which might seem an overly pedantic point to bring up, except that in the first Paddington the director Paul King made a game of such pedantry, devoting entire flashbacks to explaining how a Peruvian bear came to speak English. That brings us to the most significant change to have overtaken the series: King and his co-writer Simon Farnaby, who most recently collaborated on Wonka, have stepped aside in favour of a new creative team (King still had a hand in devising the story; Farnaby gets a cameo). King’s successor Dougal Wilson has had a long career in advertising, which has evidently formed his style: visually Paddington in Peru is brighter and flatter than its predecessors, still determined to remind us of Wes Anderson but not aspiring to the same density of whimsy.

Less cinematic and more televisual, in other words. Still, in theory the canvas is larger than before, with Paddington returning to his birthplace in search of his roots (and of his Great-Aunt Lucy—voiced as before by Imelda Staunton—who has vanished from the Home For Retired Bears). The adventures that follow have rather more to do with, say, Tintin than with the original stories by the late Michael Bond, which seldom strayed far from West London nor typically involved life-and-death stakes (A Bear Called Paddington, the first in the series, admittedly has a chapter where Paddington gets swept out to sea while building a sandcastle). But unlike his print precursor, movie Paddington is growing up, inwardly if not outwardly: he’s become noticeably less accident-prone, somewhat less naive, and much more likely to take the lead in moments of crisis, with his human dad (Hugh Bonneville) bumbling along behind.

Again, it raises the question of how much you can afford to reinvent when innocence is what you’re banking on. Paddington’s courtesy and willingness to think the best of everybody have always been vital to his character, as has his trademark “hard stare” at those who fail to live up to his expectations (something young human children are equally prone to, if my experience is any guide). But he risks becoming off-puttingly saintly if he isn’t a force for anarchy despite himself. Moreover, his most truly suspenseful scrapes are the small-scale, domestic ones (again I speak from experience, as a childhood reader of the books). When he floods the Browns’ bathroom in the first film, every child has been there more or less, whereas every child hasn’t been on a riverboat journey through the jungle seeking a lost city of the Incas.

Of course, Paddington in Peru isn’t aimed solely at children (though unlike the near-universally beloved Paddington 2, it probably won’t turn up on a lot of critics’ ten-best lists). Where Wallace and Gromit are mainly servants of the gag, the Paddington films have always had a didactic side to them, pointedly fusing what once was known as la mode rétro with aspects of the present. By Bond’s own account, the original books took inspiration from the tide of refugees flowing into post-war Britain from Europe and beyond; King’s films update the theme, while tapping into a broader notion of responsibility for the Other. Arriving in London as a vulnerable foreigner, Paddington is welcomed into the Brown family and proceeds to pay it forward wherever he goes—including to prison in Paddington 2, where his cellmates prove to be not such a rotten lot after all.

Building on this, Paddington in Peru is explicitly a film about hybrid identity, with its hero positioned between homelands (and also between species, whatever that implies within this particular fantasy). Nonetheless, anyone who recalls Paddington’s Jubilee tête-à-tête with the Queen won’t be surprised to hear that he’s a British bear first and last—which is his call to make, though I did wonder how it might go down with any young admirers in the actual Peru. Considering that Wilson and his team went to the trouble of shooting on location in both Peru and Columbia, I also wondered at the total absence of Peruvians as actors or as human characters, beyond a few colourfully-dressed extras I can’t be sure about. It’s true that guest stars Olivia Colman and Antonio Banderas would be impossible to match in the international recognition stakes (both are playing globetrotters, not purported locals, which feels like a tactical choice). Still, is there no actor in the whole country comparably adept at stealing scenes? Perhaps it’s an over-literal question, given there aren’t any actual bears in the movie either. But with his knack for making things awkward, the original Paddington would surely have asked.