Wallace and Gromit Storm Netflix With Another Madcap Adventure

Just as man’s best friend is his dog, animation fans’ favorite duo is Wallace and Gromit, the claymation buddies whose misadventures have been amusing audiences since 1989’s A Grand Day Out.

A gregarious and goofy inventor and his silent, loyal, and oft-exasperated pooch, Wallace and Gromit are a classic comedy pair, and they return to the big-screen for the first time in 19 years with Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, a loopy Aardman Animations saga—which premiered at the AFI Fest and arrives on Netflix on Jan. 3—that pits them against an old nemesis and celebrates (and playfully critiques) the very technology Wallace loves. Funny and charming as ever, it’s a welcome cinematic reprise for the British icons, even if this latest outing is slight enough to suggest that it might have been perfectly fine as a short.

Creator Nick Park co-directs Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl with Merlin Crossingham, and he remains an imaginative artist with a flair for cute-and-cuddly mayhem. Though, chronologically speaking, a follow-up to 2008’s 29-minute A Matter of Loaf and Death, the film’s touchstone is 1993’s The Wrong Trousers, insofar as its antagonist is Feathers McGraw, the diabolical penguin who decades earlier attempted to make Wallace steal the Blue Diamond for him by controlling the human’s techno-trousers.

In the wake of that foiled caper, Feathers was sentenced to a lifetime of incarceration, and as it turns out, the bars he was stuck behind were those of a zoo cage. The passage of time, however, hasn’t dimmed Feathers’ animosity toward Wallace (Ben Whitehead) and Gromit, whose faces he stares at daily courtesy of his cell’s lone decoration: a clipping of a newspaper story heralding their triumphant foiling of Feathers’ plot.

While Feathers seethes, biding his time by doing pull-ups à la Max Cady (complete with a soundtrack shout-out to Cape Fear), Wallace continues to live his jovial life as a master inventor, much to his roomie Gromit’s frustration.

Every morning when his alarm goes off, Gromit is lifted up by a machine that drops him into his slippers, leaving his long, floppy ears in a twist. Once downstairs, he’s notified by Wallace that he too is ready to rise and shine, and by pushing a button, Gromit initiates an elaborate routine, with Wallace tipped from his bed into a chute that lands him in a tub.

As he’s scrubbed with bubbly soap, the tub rolls on tracks to a curling water-slide tube that sends Wallace to the Dress-O-Matic machine which prepares him for the day, complete with a helmet to protect his noggin when he’s subsequently launched upstairs through the floor, his head hitting the ceiling before he lands squarely in his kitchen-table seat, where he eats the jelly- and jam-covered toast prepped by one of his many robo-arm-and-hand contraptions.

This is trademark Wallace & Gromit whimsy, and it doesn’t flag once Gromit looks through the mail and discovers that they’re inundated with overdue bills. Wallace admits to his canine pal that inventing is expensive, and shortly thereafter, he introduces Gromit to his latest creation: Norbot (Reece Shearsmith), a hyper-chipper “smart gnome” designed to alleviate Gromit’s gardening burden by making everything “neat and tidy!”

The wearily irritated look in Gromit’s eyes indicates that he wanted no such assistance, and he’s less than charmed by Norbot’s ensuing hyper-efficient transformation of the garden into a wonderland of geometric topiary shapes and figures. Wallace, though, is impressed, as are his neighbors, and when one asks if Norbot is available for hire, a (figurative and literal) light bulb goes off in the inventor’s head, and a new business—Wallace & Norbot’s Home Improvements—is born.

Working from Mark Burton’s script, Park peppers Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl with routinely witty touches, such as a TV news reporter named Onya Doorstep (Diane Morgan), and he additionally focuses attention on Chief Inspector Albert Mackintosh (Peter Kay) and his new hire PC Mukherjee (Lauren Patel).

Mackintosh is set to retire following a forthcoming museum exhibition of the Blue Diamond for which he’s designed a high-tech security system, but his attempt to ride off into the sunset is complicated by Feathers, who one evening uses his own robo-arm device to covertly use a police computer to gain access to Wallace’s “Top Secret Files!” In this digital control center, Feathers switches Norbot’s core protocol from “Good” to “Evil.” When Wallace awakens the next day to numerous hiring requests for Norbot, he exclaims that he could use an army of the gnomes—at which point he receives them, courtesy of Norbot, who overnight has constructed a battalion of black-eyed brothers eager to get to work.

Wallace’s bills are quickly paid off yet this Norbot army spells nothing but trouble in Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, and Park and Crossingham orchestrate it with typical panache, their animation as rubbery and lively as always, and chockablock with peripheral gags that enhance the material’s overstuffed rambunctiousness.

It’s not long before the gnomes are causing difficulties for the main characters, not least of which because they’re intent on helping Feathers finally acquire the jewel he covets, and the film stages its action with a fleetness that prevents any of its passages from sagging. At the same time, however, its narrative is a tad thin, and the closer it draws to its conclusion, the greater the impression grows that with a bit more concision, this affair might have easily been handled in half the runtime.

Still, a bit of extra Wallace and Gromit is nothing to complain about, and the film’s humorous energy is high, whether it’s cheekily referencing The Phantom of the Opera or devising clownish gags involving a gnome playing bagpipes or a boat race that moves slower than an elderly woman walking her dog.

Park casts technology as both a savior and a nuisance, and ultimately no substitute for human ingenuity and kindness—epitomized by a final, loving pat on Gromit’s head. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl embodies that sentiment, using computer-generated flourishes to enhance its gorgeous, painstaking hand-crafted animation. It’s a triumph that underscores Park’s peerless stop-motion artistry, and makes one hope that it doesn’t take another fifteen-plus years before we see the duo again.