Easter bunnies: "Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit" at 20

It was perhaps inevitable that Wallace & Gromit would appear on the big screen sooner or later. Long before 2005, their collected breakthrough shorts had become a crowdpleasing staple of Saturday morning matinee slots, and the deal Aardman struck with emerging animation giants DreamWorks in 2000 meant the company found themselves obliged to think bigger than before. Two decades on from The Curse of the Were-Rabbit's successful first run, a debate has opened up in animation circles: on one side, the poptimists who claim more W&G, in any form, can only ever be a good thing; on the other, the purists, who maintain short films remain the perfect delivery system for this pair, and bristle at any attempt to turn them into bankable content providers along the lines of the Minions or Croods. Though the deal lasted only one year and one movie more (2006's mildly maligned digimation Flushed Away), DreamWorks enabled Aardman to expand in discernible directions, both within the marketplace and within individual films: here, to supplement Peter Sallis (afforded top billing in the credits, for the first and last time in his career) and his silent sidekick with a best-of-British voicecast (Bonham Carter, Kay, Fiennes); to punch up the action with a thunderous Hans Zimmer score; and to play with plasticine enough to generate the hundreds of bunnies that overrun our heroes' hometown and gardens. (As Wallace, ever-astute, puts it: "they must be breeding like, well, rabbits.")

Yet the crucial spadework was done in the writers' room. First, arriving at the kind of set-up that used to serve those old Laurel & Hardy and Abbott & Costello spinoffs perfectly well: Wallace & Gromit go into pest control. (Fine; let the chuckles begin.) Second, realising that the expanded scope allows extended time and space for more of those gags that get all the funnier for knowing how funny any five- or six-year-olds in your orbit are going to find them: Fiennes' Victor mistakenly sticking a bunny on his head rather than his toupee, or the "lovely lady rabbit" Wallace strings up to tempt his foe ("very cheeky"). This is one of those Aardmans that got the balance right, pitched as it was both at the child in us all and the adult who might fully appreciate the horror nods and winks: the gradual reveal of Wallace's bunnitude remains inspired, and even those who would dismiss "24 carrots" as a dad joke will surely admire the audacity of stopping the climactic dogfight so that everyone can fumble around for the loose change that will keep the mechanisms going, or the last-reel deployment of cheese as a smelling salt. For this viewer, revisiting Curse pointed up the extent to which last Christmas's Vengeance Most Fowl played like Aardman stock, but all these features have assumed an unexpected new pertinence amid the rise of the tech bros, whose newfangled contraptions have been comparably well-intentioned, barely less tested, and more destructive yet. Oliver Hardy implored us to acknowledge the idiocy only he had to put up with; but Gromit now appears to look some distance beyond camera and audience, towards faltering AI-generated summaries, malfunctioning Cybertrucks and naff-looking Ghibli derivatives. A canine Cassandra, that dog sees, and he knows.

Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit returns to cinemas nationwide from Friday.