After last year’s slightly lacklustre Chicken Run sequel, Dawn of the Nugget, it seemed as though Aardman’s hitherto peerless standards might be slipping a tad. But those fears, I am happy to report, were unfounded. The latest feature from the Bristol-based animation studio is an absolute delight. Directed by Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham, Vengeance Most Fowl – featuring crackpot inventor Wallace (Ben Whitehead) and his long-suffering canine chum, Gromit – revisits the tried-and-tested Aardman formula: affable absurdity combined with precision-tooled comic timing and a selection of deliciously silly jokes about cheese.
It’s just shy of 20 years since Wallace and Gromit’s last feature film outing, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, but the world they inhabit is as cosily familiar as Wallace’s green knitted tank top. No task is too menial or simple to be massively overcomplicated by one of his technological innovations, while the faithful Gromit serves up tea, crumpets and exasperated eye-rolls.
Wallace’s newest gadget is a robotic smart gnome named Norbot, (brought to creepy life in a cheerily demented voice performance from Reece Shearsmith). The real villain, though, is Feathers McGraw, the nefarious penguin from Park’s 1993 Oscar-winning short The Wrong Trousers. With his impassive beady black eyes and a rubber glove repurposed as headgear when he’s feeling especially devious, the dastardly bird remains one of the most chilling antiheroes ever created out of plasticine.
In UK, Irish and Australian cinemas now, on BBC One on Christmas Day, and on Netflix outside the UK from 3 January
