Review: ‘Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl’ is a new champion in Aardman Animation’s long track record of humor and heart

The world is changing, folks. The advent of globalization, technology, and artificial intelligence has burdened our collective mental health with more information than we were ever meant to process, and then tries to remedy us by offering automated solutions to problems that they convince us we have.

But deep down, humans know better. We know that when we bring ourselves to our happiest spaces, we remember who we are, and what we’re capable of doing and feeling. Netflix’s Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is one of those spaces. With its cheeky, distinctly British comedic proceedings supporting a deep central theme and, of course, charming-as-ever animation, the iconic duo’s sophomore feature-length adventure soars exactly as high as we all knew it would.

The film stars Ben Whitehead as the voice of Wallace, an eccentric inventor obsessed with solving every marginal inconvenience with a new machine, much to the dismay of his analog-inclined pooch and best friend, Gromit. This tinkering quirk leads Wallace to inventing Norbot, a technologically-enhanced garden gnome who specializes in outdoor labor, and who initially commits a crime no worse than getting on Gromit’s nerves. But when the pair’s former nemesis, Feathers McGraw, reprograms Norbot for evil, disastrous hijinks become nigh-inevitable.

From the jump, this film is interested in the existential dangers posed by too much technology. But with the family-friendly canon of Wallace & Gromit as its springboard, Vengeance Most Fowl wisely zeroes in on quiet, emotional dangers rather than the apocalypse-adjacent omens that so many other films have fixated on.

Gromit, for instance, finds great joy in tending to his garden, paws in the dirt and all. He doesn’t aim to achieve a goal, or reach any kind of standard; he gardens because he loves to garden. Enter Norbot, who treats gardening like a job and reshapes Gromit’s amorphous paradise of flora into an uncannily geometric, laborious boast of robotic prowess. That one, tiny sequence speaks loud and pressing sentiment; our cultural fixation on reaching the finish line takes away the joy of doing something — not just for enjoyment, but to be present in one’s own life.

Elsewhere, Wallace promises Gromit some headpats, and Gromit perks up at the prospect of human affection, only to be blindsided by a machine designed to administer headpats. This machine then slaps Gromit around a bit, and leaves him feeling worse than he had been moments ago, once again sounding Vengeance Most Fowl‘s alarm bells around function-over-feeling, and enriching the already-nutritious comedy with a hearty dose of mindfulness.

Now, it’s no surprise that the vibrant, stop-motion claymation that has defined Aardman Animations for decades has lost none of its charm; you can feel Nick Park’s love for the medium in every frame, as one always could. Interestingly, though, Vengeance Most Fowl benefits from this animation style in a uniquely fascinating manner that none of Park’s previous efforts can claim.

This is to say that all animation is a time-consuming process, but stop-motion is one of the most time-consuming types of animation, as well as one of the most tactile In other words, the work that Park does with his hands and materials is no small amount, and the patience to create anything at all — let alone a feature film — in such a way is no doubt born of a love for the craft and the world that it creates.

And so it’s not just Vengeance Most Fowl‘s story that champions doing the tasks you love precisely because you love doing them; the entire existence of the film is an ode to such an idea. Massive CGI budgets and VFX programs have their place, but they could never touch the meticulously hand-baked, self-sufficient, and decidedly contagious joy that’s so familiar to the stop-motion world of Wallace & Gromit.

This joy rings loudest in the film’s comedic beats; Park not only nails the fundamentals of tension and subversion to a T, but leverages the impact of each beat by seeming in no hurry to get through the plot, itself a string of mostly-nonsensical shenanigans that knowingly showcase Park’s near-infallible creative instincts.

One prime example is Feathers’ attempted prison break; he jerry-rigs a mechanical arm to grab things from a long distance, and reaches for the keys hanging on a hook next to a sleeping guard… and then forgoes the keys in favor of commandeering the guard’s computer to hack into Norbot. This pivot catches us off-guard, and is the first beat in what becomes a layered gag-turned-sequence that keeps introducing newer and newer obstacles for Feathers, none of which he overcomes in the way you expect.

As Feathers’ mechanical hand types on the keyboard, for instance, a feather falls near the guard’s nose, threatening to wake them up via sneeze reflex. We expect Feathers to retract the hand to avoid being caught, but he instead uses the hand to plug the guard’s nose and prevent the sneeze, which subverts our expectations and elicits laughter. Whether or not this type of humor will land depends on the individual, but the structural intelligence of the gags is undeniable, and will likely tickle more than enough minds as a results. This, by extension, will open many people up to the film’s more subjectively endearing, vibe-centric assets. Chief among these is Mukherjee, a cheerful young police cadet voiced by Lauren Patel, who commits highway robbery on every scene she’s in.

Fully equipped with razor-sharp wit and an EQ-rich brain, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl packages the duo’s goofily-choreographed but surprisingly epic antics with a confidence that has defined them from their very beginning. A crisp 79-minute runtime, meanwhile, is more than sufficient for these characters to swoop in, make us laugh, and bid us adieu with the same grace Curse of the Were-Rabbit carried itself with years ago.

And ultimately, as the world gets more and more complicated with every passing day, it’s nice that we can count on Wallace and Gromit to keep thriving on the basics, always and forever brought to riveting life by pure human spirit.