How the ‘Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl’ Team Crafted Its Happy, Nifty Norbot (And His Army of Evil Gnomes)

Wallace and Gromit’s latest adventure, the delightfully whimsical “Vengeance Most Fowl,” celebrates the joys of doing things the old-fashioned way in a world increasingly focused on automation.

The film personifies the push and pull between the old-fashioned and new-fangled through a new character for the beloved franchise: Norbot. Invented by Wallace to help his canine best friend in the garden, the nifty, odd-jobbing robot gnome immediately grates on Gromit’s last nerve. While Wallace has good intentions, he’s lost touch with some of life’s simple pleasures (like giving Gromit a pat on the head).

With hot-button topics like the rise of AI on the minds of everyone in Hollywood, this concept may seem like a no-brainer — but the idea has actually been percolating for over 20 years with the Aardman Animations team. After all, who can attest to the power of taking it slow more than a crew of stop-motion animators?

“Wallace & Gromit” creator and “Vengeance Most Fowl” co-director Nick Park recalls discussing the idea during the creative process of 2005’s “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.” It didn’t end up fitting into that film, but he brought the idea to screenwriter Mark Burton a few years ago, and it stuck.

“It felt like the time had come,” Burton says. “We’re not Luddites! The theme is about balance with technology. It’s very much a story about Aardman itself, but it’s also that relationship where technology is great, and it’s something you should embrace, but make sure it doesn’t get in the way of human things and human relationships.”

Enter Norbot. “To have a character like Norbot, who physically gets in the way of Wallace and Gromit’s relationship, felt like a very strong metaphor for that theme,” Burton adds.

With the film’s message hinging on the tiny red and green robot, his design had to be just right. “He needed to have some structure to him, in terms of straight lines and being quite less organic than Feathers, Wallace and Gromit,” co-director Merlin Crossingham tells Variety.

Puppet designer Anne King says the early stages of designing Norbot involved nailing down his size in relation to Wallace and Gromit, perfecting his pallid gray skin tone, and working out the movement of his mouth (an early design gave him lips, but that idea was quickly scrapped). King studied the movement of ventriloquist dummies to get his jaw hinges just right.

In many ways, the Aardman team had to unlearn some of their trade secrets to create the gnome. While Wallace and Gromit boast fluid and highly expressive movement, Norbot was quite the opposite.

“The less we animated him, the better he got,” Crossingham says. “Early on, we were talking about having his eyebrows move. In the end, we glued him solid, so he’s got this fixed mask of a face.”

Norbot gets to show his creepy side when the villainous Feathers McGraw reprograms him to become evil and wreak havoc on the neighborhood. That produced an interesting challenge for the team – Norbot still has to look like something that Wallace would design but also requires a certain unsettling quality when that switch is flipped.

Norbot could have easily scowled and screamed after this transformation, but the team opted to keep his cutesy design largely the same when he turned evil – save for his eyes glazing over to become fully black and soulless.

“It plays into horror movies,” Park says. “The clown face, the ventriloquist puppet that becomes evil. The happy look can actually be so sinister.”

Norbot’s distinct voice, provided by Reece Shearsmith, stayed chipper even amidst his turn to the dark side – which is exactly what Park and Crossingham wanted.

“The happier and more cheerful he sounded, the more evil he appeared,” Crossingham says.

“We didn’t want to do any theoretical way of voicing a gnome,” Park says. “If it was something invented by Wallace, it would be a northern English accent, and in this case, quite gravelly. And that it made him all the funnier!”

Of course, one Norbot eventually becomes many as he crafts a devilish army of anthropomorphic lawn decorations, working under the employ of Feathers.

“We made over 50 blue Norbots,” King says. “There were about 10 green ones, which had interchangeable heads, so we could change them from being good to evil. And then we had this whole army of blue Norbots that we just kept making.”

Crossingham laughs. “That wasn’t enough, even then, was it? We were always short!”

There could never be too many Norbots. “I thought at first I’d over-egged it and made too many,” King says. “Obviously, that wasn’t true!”

Thankfully, Wallace and Gromit are able to save the day with a signature punny solution (“re-booting” the bots with actual boots), and the OG Norbot returns to his happy, nifty self.

Norbot and his robot pals get to work again on the garden (albeit less aggressively), and Wallace finally gives Gromit a well-deserved pat on the head: “There’s some things a machine just can’t do,” Wallace exclaims.

“We don’t try to be preachy or be black and white about tech,” Park says. “It’s just to keep a check on, is tech enhancing our human experience and relationships, or is it somehow diminishing it? We just keep a check on things, in a very Wallace and Gromit way. With gnomes!”