For many, the highlight of the entire Christmas schedule will have been a treat rare enough to savour: a new Wallace & Gromit. Thirty-five years after their charmingly slapdash debut, A Grand Day Out, the claymation duo are the closest thing this country has to Mickey Mouse – beloved, instantly recognisable icons that make us yearn for a golden time in our history that never actually existed.
Part of the claymation duo’s charm is how sparingly they’re deployed. Since A Grand Day Out, they have only appeared on screen for about three hours, half of which came in the form of the feature film (terrifyingly, nearly 20 years old) The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. So a new outing, make no mistake, is an extremely big deal.
Oddly, though, it’s as if Aardman isn’t entirely sure how to package the pair this time around. The best, most muscular Wallace & Gromit stories have always been the half-hour classics, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave. Vengeance Most Fowl is not that. Nor is it a feature film, clocking in at just over an hour. Does this mean it found itself being caught between two stools? Well, yes and no.
No, because Wallace & Gromit is genetically incapable of being bad. Even its least fondly remembered offerings (I must confess to having no memory of 2008’s A Matter of Loaf and Death) are charm personified. And so it is here, with the pair’s perfect balance – one scatterbrained and enthusiastic, the other patient and longsuffering – still in perfect working order.
And enough time has passed to give the franchise a worldview. If Vengeance Most Fowl is about anything, it’s how much we lose when we come to rely on technology. Wallace’s big invention this time is Norbot, a “smart gnome” that works as a kind of sentient Alexa, replacing the charms of simple human effort.
This is hardly a new take – this year alone, The Wild Robot managed to rip at your heartstrings with this exact premise – but there’s something extremely touching about seeing it happen during a Wallace & Gromit adventure. This is a series that has never been afraid to do things the old way. CGI might be easier and less time-consuming, but there’s something beautifully tangible about incrementally manipulated stop-motion animation. The process is tedious, but the effort pays off.
There’s also something that’s happily askew this time around. Wallace and Gromit are still as funny as ever, with every frame full of puns and sight gags, but the fact that the enemy here is one of Gromit’s gadgets gone wrong acts as a happy piece of self-commentary. All of Wallace’s Heath Robinson-style productivity gadgets seemed like fun decades ago, but this time there’s a slight weariness to them. And the less said about the gargantuan passive-aggression needed to create a voice-activated virtual assistant for your mute dog the better.
More than anything, though, Vengeance Most Fowl scores highly for bringing back Feathers McGraw, the inscrutable penguin mega-villian from The Wrong Trousers. Arguably the best character Nick Park ever created, McGraw goes full Sideshow Bob here. Languishing in a maximum-security zoo, ripped and fixated on revenge, he is a figure of pure menace. This would be his Cape Fear, if only he wasn’t so darn adorable. It’s also worth pointing out that the sheer expression the animators have wrought from a character who is essentially a beer bottle with flippers is astonishing. There’s a shrug McGraw performs near the end that manages to say everything you need to know about the character. It is extraordinary.
However, this is Wallace & Gromit. And Wallace & Gromit is perfect, which also means that it’s blazingly obvious when things are less than perfect. Vengeance Most Fowl does end up suffering a little, in part because of an extended runtime that renders it less densely packed with jokes and invention than we’ve become used to. It’s also a bit too talky, robbing the pair of the easy international appeal they had when their dialogue was kept spare. This is a shame.
On the plus side, nobody can pull off a third act like this franchise. By the time the credits have rolled, after a berserk narrowboat chase featuring wild handbrake turns, huge explosions and one stunt ripped straight from the most recent Mission: Impossible film, you’re back in love again. At this stage, Wallace and Gromit are legendary. Even when they’re slightly off their pace, there’s nobody you’d rather spend Christmas with.