With both Joker and Cruella getting sequels and the Wicked movie still on the horizon, it seems that the trend of movies reimagining classic stories from the villains' perspectives isn't dying out any time soon. And on that topic, a recent Twitter query asking people what villain deserves this treatment next found an unexpected yet worthy contender becoming a popular answer: Feathers McGraw from the Wallace & Gromit short The Wrong Trousers.
Feathers McGraw is the penguin who pushes Gromit out of Wallace's house before using the Techno-Trousers to control Wallace and steal a diamond from the museum. He wears a glove on his head to disguise himself as a chicken while committing crimes -- and he also carries a gun. With his utterly blank expression, Feathers is a cute but also genuinely intimidating antagonist, only being stopped when he falls into a glass bottle.
The Wrong Trousers is a perfect short film as is, and Feathers McGraw is so entertainingly absurd that he doesn't need any explanation for why he is the way he is. However, if Nick Park and the team at Aardman Animation were to explore his backstory and make him the protagonist of a new movie, it's easy to imagine ways it can build on that absurdity while also serving as a parody of revisionist villain protagonist movies. Since dalmatians had a hand in Cruella's origin, it's time to explore what trousers did to Feathers.
Any Feathers' movie should naturally embrace his gleefully criminal nature in the end, making it more like Joker than Cruella or Maleficent. If they feel compelled to offer a sympathetic angle to the sociopathic penguin, however, there's an easy in baked right into the source material: Feathers' relationship with the zoo. At the end of The Wrong Trousers, the zoo is his prison sentence. Aardman's already made a great movie about animals in captivity in the form of Chicken Run, and while zoos are very different from factory farms, there's still some storytelling potential there.
Aardman has had plenty of success spinning off secondary Wallace & Gromit characters into the stars of their own cartoons -- just look at how Shaun the Sheep went from being a side character in A Close Shave to the star of his own TV series and two movies. And to add even more fuel to the fire, Feathers has already gotten some spinoff action as the antagonist of the 2003 video game Wallace & Gromit in Project Zoo, in which he enslaves the other zoo animals for a diamond mine.
A Feathers McGraw movie could offer more great dialogue-free slapstick comedy akin to Shaun the Sheep while also going in darker and weirder directions. The idea is an opportunity for Aardman to embrace full-on psychological horror without sacrificing the laughter and show all the other villain protagonist movies how it's done.
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