How Aardman Made Wallace & Gromit’s Silent Villain Work

Stop-motion animation is a prospect challenging enough for any studio, even Aardman, which has been pioneering the form for decades at this point. But what happens when you decide to bring back a villain who’s famous for not being able to say a single word, can barely move any part of their face, and mostly gets by by standing around and blinking?

“That has been one of the most challenging aspects really, of the whole movie,” Nick Park recently told Inverse about the decision to bring back Feathers McGraw, the villain of Wallace & Gromit‘s second TV outing, The Wrong Trousers, decades later for Vengeance Most Fowl, now streaming worldwide on Netflix. “At least Gromit has a brow he can move up. He can understand thoughts more clearly. It’s all about the simplicity of how Feathers moves, the deliberate and small movements. A look here, a blink. Minimalism, really.”

As Park explained, Wallace & Gromit is no stranger to silent characters, given that the titular second half of the duo is a dog who can’t talk. But Gromit is still surprisingly articulate: his ears can move, his eyes are similar to any other human characters, he can move different parts of his face, and has full hands, feet, and even a neck to move his body about with and express his emotions clearly to the audience. Feathers, on the other hand, is a tiny stylized penguin (occasionally disguised as a rooster). His eyes are tiny beads, his entire body is shaped like a bottle. If Feathers wants to use body language, he’s got his flippers, which are restricted in their own ways, and then he’s got moving his whole body at once. And yet, in both Wrong Trousers and Vengeance Most Fowl, he remains utterly charming, occasionally sinister, and still completely communicable to the audience.

Despite there being over three decades’ time between his on-screen appearances, the techniques Park (and now his Vengeance Most Fowl co-director, Merlin Crossingham) used to make Feathers “feel” akin to any other character in Wallace & Gromit have remained the same. “We use camera moves, the sound,” Crossingham explained. “He’s a very cinematic character because we rely, as filmmakers, on all those tricks to make him the hero/villain that you see and love to hate.”

The more things change, the more some things stay the same. But for Wallace & Gromit, and Aardman more generally, it speaks to the timelessness of the craft involved in this kind of traditional hand animation. “Back when Toy Story first came out in the ’90s, a studio like us, we’re thinking, ‘Oh, boy, how long do we have left?’” Park concluded. “But we kept going. As long as you’re telling good stories, compelling stories with compelling characters, then it’s just the technique really.” All these years later, Feathers remains as compelling as he has ever been—and still up to those same cinematic tricks.

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is now streaming on Netflix.

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