Wallace & Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death

I really like the Wallace and Gromit franchise. Like (according to Google hit counts) pizza, sex, and beer, even when it’s bad it’s still pretty good. The most recent installment (which despite Netflix’s listed 87-minute runtime, is actually a short) is indeed pretty good. On technical issues, it has the usual fine Aardman touch for stop-motion animation quality, so that’s not where my complaint lies. Rather, it’s that it’s a bit out of line with the established style of the series to date (I would have no objection to a conscious genre shift. If the next W&G feature were, say, an urban psychological drama about a man and his hallucinatory dog, I would be shocked and surprised, but not actually disappointed unless they did it badly. However, AFAICT, the stylistic shift here is not the result of an intentional departure).

The most conspicuous point of tiredness is in the shout-outs and homages to a hell of a lot of films familiar to the kind of geeks that watch Wallace and Gromit (I’d say “well-known” in general, but how many people in the mainstream are familiar with the Adam West Batman film?). I counted 3 explicit gags, and I bet I didn’t catch all of them. The franchise has actually always had a bunch of fun, gentle pop-culture spoofs, but Nick Park has not generally seen the need to put them front-and-center like this. And especially in a short film, these cheap shots detract from the film developing its own character. I felt like Wererabbit was in some ways a retread of A Close Shave, but this one is just self-indulgent. Despite the aspirations to the series’ usual level of zaniness, Loaf and Death missed the mark and felt a bit stale too many times. It has shifted stylistically as well, but not into a very comfortable place: it’s darker and, one might say, nastier than its predecessors. Piella is a vicious character, and her motivations, while absurd, are a bit too close to real-world concerns to really fit into W&G‘s generally rosy worldview. The shift from innocent charm to slightly-less-innocent charm is not really an improvement.

See also: IMDB, Wikipedia.