On demand: "Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl"

This time last year, I concluded my review of the almost immediately forgettable sequel Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget by offering up a prayer that Nick Park was busying himself with plasticine in an Aardman corner office. The good news this Christmas, as you've doubtless already noticed, is that he was. Vengeance Most Fowl - which, in a sign of the many masters Aardman are now contracted to serve, opened in UK cinemas on December 18 and aired on the BBC on Christmas Day ahead of its arrival on Netflix in the New Year - is itself more than a little sequelly: it sees the return of not just Park's beloved Wallace and Gromit, but Feathers McGraw, the dead-eyed penguin antagonist of 1993's The Wrong Trousers, here going full Max Cady in busting out of prison (or zoo) to make our heroes' lives tricky again. Yet the return to tried-and-tested Aardman formula has been supplemented by a few fresh visual and narrative ideas. The W&G garden, for starters, has been repurposed as Gromit's escape from an incessantly automated household - until the introduction of AI gnome Norbot (voiced by Reece Shearsmith), who's scraped all his operating data from a show called DIY Action Force and promptly sets about turning this florid Kew into an angular, rather soulless Marienbad ("Neat and tidy!"). Sometimes these new ideas feel faintly recycled: having a copper answer the phone with "'ello 'ello 'ello" is an example of a joke being so old it's been semi-forgotten and so amuses all over again. (Perhaps inevitably, the character is voiced by Peter Kay.) And when Norbot is seized upon as a Trojan horse enabling Feathers to access our heroes' home, Vengeance Most Fowl returns to a foundational idea of genre cinema: that, when placed in the wrong hands, tech might prove as much existential threat as nifty timesaver.

The new film thus mirrors a struggle going on within Aardman, a cottage industry whose Oscar wins prompted deals with major players (first DreamWorks, then Sony, now Netflix) and thereafter a scaling-up of production to meet the ruthless demands of a bigger system. As Vengeance bears out, the company's strong suit remains those little, humanising touches at which neither supercomputer nor artificial intelligence could arrive. Feathers idly tapping a flipper while guessing Wallace's password (it's not, in the end, rocket science); a young constable (Lauren Patel) busting open a cellar door CSI-style while wielding a flashlight, only for her superior to reach around the doorjamb and flip the lightswitch; Wallace, in a low moment, plucking out a discordant version of the series' theme tune on an untuned piano. My gut feeling is that no Aardman feature - not even the beloved Farmageddon - has quite scaled the dizzy heights of the company's short masterpieces, because - to use a metaphor even the dozy Wallace could grasp - the internal wiring gets looser and flappier, those Eureka moments more spaced out, the bigger the films become. The whole Norbot business here feels like a delaying tactic designed to fill the forty-or-so minutes before the Fury/Usyk-like main event of visually mirroring, perfectly matched adversaries Gromit and Feathers going head-to-head once more; we're watching two workable ideas for shorts that have been twisted together like pipecleaners. (Or moulded together from differently coloured lumps of clay.) The positive is that Park and co-director Merlin Crossingham thereby allow themselves time to exercise greater control over notionally small stuff: the voice casting (Ben Whitehead's soothing Northern tones amply matching the late Peter Sallis's performances as Wallace), a light smattering of choice sightgags, varyingly suggestive puns ("ooh, me begonias") which will doubtless yield an even cheerier response over the boozy festive period. Nothing too revolutionary, then, but a small step back in the right direction for its makers.

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is now streaming via iPlayer, and will also be available to stream via Netflix from January 2, 2025.