Review: Aardman’s patented British drollery returns with top-notch ‘Vengeance Most Fowl’

A master of disguise, an evil genius with plenty of tricks up his wings and a relentless pursuer of retribution, Feathers McGraw nests among cinema’s great villains without ever having crooned a single chirp. It’s all in the notorious clay penguin’s blank face.

McGraw has been slow-cooking his revenge against Wallace and Gromit, Aardman Animations’ inventor-and-dog duo, while serving time at a zoo since “The Wrong Trousers” back in 1993. His plan finally unfolds in “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl,” the beloved British pair’s first feature-length adventure since the Oscar-winning “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” almost two decades ago.

This hilarious and expertly crafted new clay-animation caper begins by reminding us that all those years ago, Wallace and Gromit thwarted McGraw’s attempt to steal an invaluable blue diamond. Yet the malevolent flightless bird with a chip on his plumage isn’t the sole antagonist of “Vengeance Most Fowl.” The unchecked implementation of technology in daily menial tasks is just as big of a specter here. The trouble becomes twofold when that technology falls into McGraw’s grasp.

Nick Park, the creator of Wallace and Gromit, returns to direct, this time with a veteran animator at the studio, Merlin Crossingham, as his co-director. The mayhem typical to these adventures is set in motion when Wallace — now voiced by Ben Whitehead after Peter Sallis, the character’s original voice, died in 2017 — builds Norbot (Reece Shearsmith), a comically creepy, artificially intelligent gnome, with the intention of helping Gromit with his gardening work. But once Norbot’s hardware is hacked to carry out crimes and then replicated to create an army of evil gnomes, Gromit must fight back to protect Wallace. The pup appreciates doing things for pleasure, not efficiency, thus the gnomes irk him.

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One of Aardman’s trademarks is how its films effectively adapt easily recognizable tropes to their wacky characters. Here, sci-fi movies such as “The Terminator” and “The Matrix” read as likely inspirations to the more classic cops-and-robbers aspect of the plot. Tucked inside Aardman’s putty preoccupations is a potent philosophical statement about the irreplaceable quality of the human touch. Since the painstaking technique of stop-motion animation relies literally on the artists’ handicraft, this tracks brilliantly. Especially since Wallace and Gromit’s friendship has always been a representation of the struggle between doing things the old-fashioned way and a desire for constant innovation.

“Vengeance Most Fowl” preserves the essence of this silly hand-molded universe — Gromit remains as clever as ever and Wallace stays as clueless, if always well-intentioned — while simultaneously striving for more ambitious visual components. Sight gags baked into the production design (the books the Gromit reads or the signs that populate the sets) and gnome puns aplenty make for a ride in which every frame packs a dense layer of comedy, at times conspicuous, others not so much.

The team at Aardman knows how to manipulate our expectations for maximum humor, so much that seeing Feathers McGraw swiveling on a chair holding a new pet can yield laugh-out-loud results. The moment is a typical Bondian bad-guy intro, and yet because of the facetiously serious tone and absurd context around it, it’s absolutely sidesplitting. The inept Chief Inspector Mackintosh (Peter Kay) and up-and-coming copper Mukherjee (Lauren Patel) trying to carry out her investigation by the book complement the mishap-prone ensemble.

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Park, also the co-writer here with longtime collaborator Mark Burton, has had the foresight to space out the “Wallace & Gromit” productions so that we never feel like they’ve overstayed their welcome. Rather, it’s like we get the chance to catch up with old friends we’ve missed. They successfully toe the line between staying faithful to the established formula and the need to innovate just enough to keep it modern, while not diluting the charm with vapid pop-culture references.

And though Aardman might implement more digital tools these days, its heroes and foes are still unequivocally human-operated. “There’s some things a machine just can’t do,” says a grinning Wallace at one point, and that’s true both of patting his canine buddy with affection and of art-making itself.