We need to talk about the genius of the musical number in ‘Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl’

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl has officially taken flight on Netflix, and not a speck of merit has washed off Nick Park’s beloved duo all these years later. Indeed, beyond the frantically funny dialogue and set pieces that we’ve come to expect from the cheese-loving inventor and his no-nonsense pooch, Vengeance Most Fowl also has more than a few insightful things to say about why we need to relax our reliance on technology.

Those familiar with this mainstay of British pop culture will already be familiar with Wallace’s zany morning routine, which involves machines that get him out of bed, dress him, bathe him, sit him down at the table, and feed him breakfast. Usually, this is a chuckle-worthy quirk, but Vengeance Most Fowl sees it a bit differently; if machines do all of our living for us, what space is left for us to occupy?

This theme comes to a front when Wallace introduces his latest creation — Norbot, a prototype robotic garden gnome that can whip up a socially acceptable backyard in a matter of seconds. This leads to even more Norbots being invented to handle even more gardening and yardwork, eventually pairing these jobs with a tune about loving to tidy up, sung in unison by all the working Norbots.

And that tune is the darkest extreme of what Vengeance Most Fowl is playing upon here.

Let’s break this down: The main thematic idea of Vengeance Most Fowl is that our obsession with treating everything as a job that needs to be finished is harming our ability to enjoy things, which in turn harms our emotional connection to our lives and the world we inhabit. This obsession leads us to automation, which can accomplish more tasks at an exponentially faster rate at the cost of removing us from the process entirely.

But there’s another layer to this that isn’t considered often enough; robots (such as Norbot), machines, and artificial intelligence may be capable of completing all of these tasks faster (be it gardening, creating, or what have you), but they aren’t capable of enjoying these tasks. Think about that: It’s tragic enough that Gromit was deprived of gardening (which is something he loves doing), but how uncanny is it that gardening is now being done by something physically incapable of loving the task at all? With robots, there’s not even precedence to enjoy the act of doing something; the loss of connection inherent in doing something is now twofold.

With that in mind, consider how downright disturbing it is for these robots — who, again, are not capable of enjoying the things that they do — to be singing a song about how great it is to complete yard work; a song coded as a sort of blue-collar shanty sung specifically to raise morale on the factory floor. They’re robots; morale doesn’t need to be raised.

And really, this is the point that so many real-life conversations about artificial intelligence are missing the mark on, specifically those about AI art and writing. Proponents champion this technology because of the speed with which it can create a photo or a paragraph, and they like that efficiency because it means the result can be consumed (not enjoyed; consumed) faster. This is also true of the AI itself; the machine’s relationship to the result is exclusively one of efficiency and completion. It does not enjoy creating because it is not capable of enjoying it, or even understanding why it’s doing what it’s doing.

But humans don’t want to consume art; they want to love it. The act of both creating and engaging with any art is born from loving it, and robots have no such emotional starting point. Thus, the purpose of art is lost entirely by having robots create something, just as the purpose for Gromit’s gardening was lost when Norbot hijacked the backyard, and then tried to convince us through song that a life based on completing tasks rather than enjoying oneself is fulfilling.