In Wallace and Gromit: A Matter Of Loaf Or Death, Wallace and his dog, Gromit, open a bakery and get tied up with a murder mystery. But, when Wallace falls in love Gromit is left to solve the case.
GENRE BLEND OF ‘A MATTER OF LOAF OR DEATH’
comedy, horror, romance >> cosy mystery
STORY WORLD OF ‘A MATTER OF LOAF OR DEATH’
The town’s milieu was inspired by thoughts of 1950s Wigan. It’s sort of like 1950s steampunk. Similar towns are seen in the live action Midsomer Murders series. It’s very English. As a consequence, Wallace comes out with very British idiomatic expressions pretty much every time he speaks. His life revolves around very English foods, especially cheese.
The films appeal to a dual audience partly by including a frequent scattering of allusions to pop culture. There are plenty of puns and nods of recognition in the intratext — Meat-a-bix written on Fluffles’ bed box instead of Weet-a-bix, for instance.
STORY STRUCTURE OF ‘A MATTER OF LOAF OR DEATH’
SHORTCOMING
Wallace has a kindly nature, and is perhaps a little over-optimistic. This blinds his view on reality. In a Courage The Cowardly Dog sort of character combo, it’s up to Gromit to save the day while his owner goes blithely about his everyday business. Wallace is basically Muriel. While Wallace wants cheese and hot pots all the time, Muriel likes a nice cup of tea. (No coincidence that Muriel is from the British Isles, even in an American cartoon series.) Isn’t it a shame that Wallace never met Muriel? Now they would’ve made a happy couple.
DESIRE
Wallace is a single man who readily falls in love with any attractive woman who crosses his path. He wants a pretty wife. (This is also his downfall because he keeps meeting the wrong women.)
OPPONENT
This story has a romantic plot, so the romantic target is also the opponent in any romance. Here, the romantic opponent is also the villain.
Piella Bakewell is a hyper-feminized villain whose lipstick, elaborate hair-do and sausage-skin-tight dress work to tell us that she is not as she appears underneath. She is also a middle-aged woman who was thin in her youth, and has a vendetta against bakers because they bake all the delicious things which have made her fat.
I find this character and her storyline problematic. Femininity as artifice is a trope common throughout both fiction and real life. This is most clearly seen in stories (including reality TV shows and documentaries) featuring male-to-female transgender people. But it also applies to feminine cis-gendered women.
In our present system of gender, when drawing the lines between femininity and masculinity, we’ve positioned the latter as being the natural, stripped down, down-to-earth, nice and simple, no-frills, no-frivolity concept. We like to imagine that the masculine is just pragmatic and to the point, lacking in any unnecessary aesthetic considerations. We imagine it to be efficient and direct. Conversely, the feminine is believed to be artifice, an elaborate costume, all just poses and aesthetics and frivolous dalliance, wholly lacking in any pragmatic value. It’s an ornament, rather than a tool, and is anything but direct, instead regarded as endlessly complex, subtle, mysterious and intuitive. Full of uncanny, inscrutable excesses like feelings and beauty and style. The feminine is fey, precious, wild, unknowable. The masculine is rational, basic, objective, and ever so apparent.
FTB
While Wallace is stupid, any individual male character can be stupid, especially when it comes to love. This is not connected to hyper-masculinity. Wallace’s stupidity does say something about how men can be easily taken in when they fall in love, but this is provoked by the woman’s artifice. It started in the Garden of Eden.
At least since Biblical times, Women Are Liars is a cultural narrative from way back. Femininity As Artifice is a subtype of that idea.
As for the message about body shape, the whole story relies on the audience’s implicit knowledge that, for this middle-aged woman, putting on weight is one of the worst things that could happen. There is never any critique of this idea. Fatness is the joke. Specifically, female fatness. Wallace is allowed to glory in food to his heart’s content.
The thing is, this is a very clever story. The symbolism and the jokes work so well. It makes total sense that Piella would want to get rid of bakers — not only that, there’s a perfectly timed joke about getting a full ‘baker’s dozen’. The dough itself resembles doughy middle-aged people. Piella’s hyper-femininity works well as a ruse because pink, flowers and 1950s housewives are popularly considered the antidote to the masculinity of big struggles which take place in the outside world. Because this is all so clever, it’s can all be explained away. But a story is never just a story. This particular story relies heavily on worn-out sexist tropes.
On a less annoying note, Piella Bakewell has a little dog — a female who is a poodle. The poodle is a victim — a mute cute — and does what she can to help Gromit defeat their mutual opponent. I am grateful to the writers that Gromit and Fluffles do not end up an item, a la Milo and Otis and many other stories, where it seems the only truly happy ending for a boy character involves falling in love with a pretty girl character, even when the personalities are animalised children.
PLAN
It’s up to Gromit to save the day. Realising Piella’s evil plan, he is unable to talk owing to his being a mute dog, so he is left with no other choice but to research how to build a security machine. He frisks Piella at the door to their house with an airport security type thing. He confiscates her ladle. He has already locked away all the knives in the house.
BIG STRUGGLE
This is foiled with Piella cracks on Gromit bit her. Gromit is muzzled with a bread basket and chained to the sink.
Fortunately he has already set up a Rube Goldberg type machine to send her flying with a sack of flour on a string.
For a while it looks like the story is over, but we sense it’s not. How does the audience know that, after Wallace and Piella have first split up, that the story isn’t finished? What exactly is it that we’re sensing? If the story had ended there, there would have been insufficient build-up. A big struggle is a big struggle sequence. Sending Piella flying with one small sack of flour does not match the formidableness of the villain.
Piella arrives for a forced reunion and has bought a ‘cake’, which viewers know to be some sort of trap — is it poisoned? Is there a punching machine inside? We soon find out there’s a cartoon bomb — the big round ball with a single lit fuse.
There is an extensive action scene in which the bomb is caught inside Wallace’s trousers. Gromit saves him by filling his trousers with dough.Jokes involving trousers and the exposure of bums are particularly funny to a middle grade audience. The bomb blows up but Wallace is saved. This is the exaggerated, comical final big struggle that viewers expect from a comedy which has already opened with masterful action sequences (the cycling downhill and the near death experience falling into the alligator pit).
ANAGNORISIS
Wallace seems to have a anagnorisis after the break up, sitting at the table drinking tea with Gromit, the Only Sane Dog in the room. There is no true anagnorisis because these are plot driven stories and we can’t have Wallace coming to his senses or there would be no more adventures to be had. When Wallace turns his attention back to food this is funny precisely because he has zero anagnorisis.
NEW SITUATION
Piella is thrown into the alligator pit, the one we saw earlier, which just so happens to exist nearby. Her vanity is her downfall. She has insisted on riding the advertising blimp despite being too heavy for it. The murder conveniently takes place off screen, down the well and out of view, but we know she’s been killed because the alligator burps.
As in every Wallace and Gromit story, Wallace soon turns his mind to food, the clock which runs his day.
The story ends with a setting sun.
