Wallace &/or Gromit: who gets to be cozy?
Cozycore is facilitated by a wave of emerging technologies, but the work that goes into building them – and their benefits – aren’t distributed equally
It’s easy to get caught up in X threads, film forums, and Substack reviews of the latest “vital” indie film. But if we really want to see our broader culture reflected back at us – not only the culture of galleries and the internet and small pockets of major metropolises, but also of kitchen tables and the backs of buses and industrial estates – you still can’t beat pop culture, and family-friendly pop culture specifically. Which is how I find myself writing almost 2,000 words on Wallace & Gromit, a perfect distillation of the themes I wrote about in ‘Cozycore’ and the comfort trap. You don’t need to read that post before this one, but it might make more sense if you do.
A certain generation of Brits talk about the BBC with a sense of reverence and nostalgia, like an ancient holy text. They reminisce about iconic idents that aired between programmes. Test Card F. Ceefax. The Simpsons, pre-Channel 4 or Disney+. The medium is the message, and wistful memories of the public service broadcaster speak to some yearning for a ‘better time’ when – we believed – institutions had our best interests at heart, governed on the basis of social and political usefulness. Today we have platforms guided by the (dis)organising flow of capital. No one thinks Netflix or Disney are motivated by our lasting happiness and wellbeing… unless those outcomes happen to be the most profitable. But the good old days are gone. Nostalgia isn’t enough to bring them back, and tradition is a poor excuse for anything.
The unavoidable truth: the future of the BBC is now less certain than ever. Viewing figures are in steep decline, on top of low trust, job cuts, and a “brain drain” that’s seen top talent defect to private media companies founded by hedge fund managers and/or multimillionaire gambling dynasties. When the BBC’s royal charter is renewed in 2027, there’s talk of scrapping the license fee altogether; others say it should be extended to viewers of private streaming services, even if they don’t watch the BBC, which isn’t exactly a vote of confidence in public service broadcasting. And yet…
I watched Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl alongside almost 9.5 million others when it aired on BBC One on Christmas Day, 2024. The film was a big win for the broadcaster, scoring more than 20 million viewers in the following month, and picking up multiple BAFTAs and an Oscar nomination for the animation studio, Aardman. Sure enough, coziness and nostalgia played a big part in its success. Critics called it as “comforting as cheese and crackers”. Viewers celebrated the return of W&G’s most familiar nemesis, the criminal penguin Feathers McGraw. An (overblown) metacommentary about Aardman running out of clay added a sense of urgency to the conversation – a sense of the past as something fragile, that needed clinging onto. If Christmas already exists in a kind of quasi-Dickensian timewarp, now the BBC itself seemed to spiral back through the decades, toward a better time.
In a way, Vengeance Most Fowl attempts the opposite: to drag Wallace & Gromit into the future, with major plot points revolving around AI and robotics. At the same time, it paints a sceptical picture of our increasing reliance on technology. In the opening scenes we see how Wallace, a professional inventor, has ‘streamlined’ his life using various contraptions, down to a Pat-O-Matic that shoulders the physical and emotional ‘labour’ of patting his dog/best friend. “Wallace’s inventions are really starting to get to Gromit,” says creator Nick Park in a behind-the-scenes video. “And they’re starting to come between them.” This comes to a head with the invention of Norbot – an AI-powered “smart gnome” with some glaring alignment issues.
First, it takes over Gromit’s gardening, failing to see the pleasure he takes in the challenge, and the beauty of an untamed English garden. Then, it’s remotely hacked by Feathers McGraw to self-replicate and break the penguin out of prison (the zoo). Production on Vengeance Most Fowl began in 2022, so the source of its tech anxiety is obvious; it chimes with a broader tech-lash across both mainstream and ‘High’ culture; it also reflects Aardman’s growing reliance on CGI, versus the traditional plasticine puppets that make its early animation so charming.
In fact, the commentary might be more interesting without the Feathers McGraw/hacking element – if we were able to see the damage a misaligned AI robot could do on its own. What an intelligent machine can and will do to achieve its programmed goal. Garden gnome turned paperclip maximiser, folding all the world’s clay into the perfect garden. But Feathers is familiar, a clear villain and an easy win, especially in the comfy nostalgia of Christmastime, so his returning role makes sense.
What I really want to talk about is a specific sequence that doesn’t really have anything to do with Norbot at all. It’s a sequence that’s always particularly satisfying, even more so for its repetition in various W&G films. When he wakes up in the morning, Wallace calls on Gromit to activate a series of machines that get him out of bed, give him a bath, dress him, and deposit him at the breakfast table, tea and toast at the ready.
This sequence demonstrates a couple of key behaviours I associated with cozycore in my last post:
Instead of changing (and perhaps growing) himself, Wallace reshapes the world with his effortless comfort and convenience in mind.
In doing so, Wallace positions himself at the centre of his own cozy universe – he becomes an unchanging, immovable object, who doesn’t do anything as much as he has things happen to him.
Like a Rube Goldberg machine, the pleasure’s in the precise cause-and-effect of his mechanical morning routine. What happens if he wants a different kind of jam one morning, or wants to soak in the bath a few moments longer? I’m not sure. For the purposes of the film, it doesn’t matter. But later on, we get to see the side effects of his rigid, hyper-convenient life.
There are two iterations of the sequence in Vengeance Most Fowl: once at the start, to establish how things should be, and once after most of Wallace’s machines have been confiscated by the police. (The gnomes have committed a series of thefts from his neighbours to build their growing army; the blame is wrongfully placed at Wallace’s feet. Although it is kind of his fault, depending where you stand on machine consciousness.) The second time we see his morning unfold, Wallace pushes buttons and pulls levers based on instinct and habit. But nothing happens. And his dependence on the machines has made him inflexible; without them, he’s rendered basically helpless, and quickly declares his defeat. Here is a central problem with tech-dependent cozycore:
The more we come to rely on technology to make our lives easier, smoother, and swifter, the less equipped we are to do the task of living ourselves. If one day the machines should all break or disappear, we might find ourselves unable to do without them.
This is a slightly obvious statement. We can all see how, in a waiting room or wherever, staring at your phone has become a stand-in for the difficult task of engaging with other human beings (despite the fact talking with strangers has documented benefits re: happiness, informational richness, and overall well-being). Or how ready meals and food delivery have eroded people’s ability to cook from scratch. Or how note-taking with a laptop or tablet has left a growing number of students – since the 2010s – to regard cursive handwriting “as foreign as ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics”. As the psychiatrist Alex Curmi writes (making reference to the “evolutionary mismatch” I also touched on last post):
“Modern hyper-convenience is a kind of deal with the devil. It is seductive because it appeals to our instincts, but it surreptitiously depletes us. It has made it easier to get by, but in many ways harder to truly succeed.”
An ambient awareness of this fact is present throughout the new Wallace & Gromit – ambient, but potent, especially in a story that’s nominally about AI, evoking any number of speculative futures where we’re “surreptitiously depleted” by the outsourcing of our physical and intellectual faculties to intelligent machines. Or maybe I’m just reading too much into it… But I’m not done yet. There’s another interesting facet to the chain reaction that takes Wallace from bed to breakfast table, that’s less to do with the inventor himself. Here, we turn to Gromit.
Gromit wakes up before Wallace. As the inventor’s loyal companion – before he’s rendered redundant by AI – the dog is responsible for kicking many of the morning-routine-machines into action, a task he performs with the reluctant obedience of an anthropomorphic beagle who knows he’s not reaching his full potential, who doesn’t even get to feel the warmth of a human hand any more. (In 1993’s The Wrong Trousers, it’s implied they take the responsibility in turns, but by 2025 Gromit is doing all the work.) Watching this, I was struck by the falsehood that Wallace’s machines were “automatic” and found it remarkably similar to some of the magical claims about today’s AI technologies.
In 2023, Kenyan content moderators helping to train OpenAI’s ChatGPT filed a petition alleging psychological trauma, low pay and abrupt dismissal; one recalled projecting paranoid narratives onto passersby, after reading hundreds of the perverse fantasies people typed into the machine. According to Time, they were paid less than $2 per hour. Elsewhere, gig workers on marketplaces like Amazon Mechanical Turk report labelling footage from a camera strapped to a baby’s head, in return for precarious pay, and said they’re often denied knowledge of the end product they’re helping to create. Increasingly, it seems, this kind of work will come to dominate the lives of academics and other professionals, too. Then, there’s all the rest of us, whose behaviour serves as training data 24 hours a day, based on the fragile promise of artificial general intelligence that “benefits all of humanity”.
Consciously or not, Gromit serves as an accurate stand-in for the vast human workforce that facilitates the technologies making our lives more comfortable and convenient – unseen, undercompensated, and not even necessarily invested in the end product. Of course, the human element is only one facet of the training process. If we want to get even more metaphorical, the plasticine dog might be seen to symbolise everything we choose to ignore in the name of a cozy existence made possible by modern tech, including ecological damage, massive data theft, and unequal distribution of the benefits across class and geography.
Is it too much to suggest that these conversations were a conscious influence at Aardman? Again, maybe! But pop culture doesn’t lie. Every laugh that Wallace & Gromit elicits from its tens of millions of viewers, when it makes a joke about our growing dependence on technology, contains a kernel of truth about our very real anxieties.
In a slightly unimaginative conclusion, the film simply suggests that moderation is the way forward – we need to walk the near-impossible tightrope, holding onto the best parts of the past and future to balance ourselves. Wallace comes to understand the importance of a (literal) human touch, while Gromit learns to delegate some of his hard labour to a mechanical gnome. And this kind of conscious, nuanced approach to modern life is important, but in real life it’s rarely so simple. The mechanics of emerging technologies are sprawling, complex, and full of unpredictable domino effects. They require constant renegotiation and a willingness to ask awkward questions. If there’s one to take away from the BBC’s most-watched film in 25 years, it might be this: who gets to be cozy, and why?