There are all sorts of ways to greet the new year but few seem more sane-making and soul-satisfying than spending time with Wallace and Gromit. It’s been nearly two decades since these stop-motion British delights set off on their first feature-length outing, “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.” Much seems the same at 62 West Wallaby Street, where the duo lives in a squat brick house. There, the old-fashioned wallpaper still looks reassuringly faded, and everyday life tends to be quiet when it isn’t a cracking adventure.
For the uninitiated, Wallace is a bald, toothy, eccentric inventor of whirring, beeping gadgets that no one else much wants. He likes toast with his breakfast tea and frets over bills while Gromit peruses the morning paper. Gromit, I should note at this point, is Wallace’s beagle. An infinitely patient good boy with expressively floppy ears and no (visible) mouth, Gromit is more truly Wallace’s helpmate and recurrent savior. Daring and brave, he is a dog of untold talents who enjoys knitting, gardening and reading books like “Crime and Punishment” by Fido Dogstoyevsky. Occasionally, he strolls about on two legs; he’s been known to fly a plane.
Their new movie, “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl” — directed by the pair’s creator, Nick Park, in tandem with Merlin Crossingham — gets down to business crisply. Wallace (voiced by Ben Whitehead) has ramped up his inventing, and the Wallaby Street house now resembles a veritable Rube Goldberg funfair. Wallace is chuffed by his latest creation, a “nifty odd-jobbing robot” in the form of a garden gnome that he calls Norbot (Reece Shearsmith). It looks pretty much like one of the statuettes that has been in their front yard since the first Wallace and Gromit short film (“A Grand Day Out,” 1989), except that this gnome is computer-driven. It’s a creepy, walking, talking, cutting-edge appliance, a Roomba with teeth.
Just how sharp those choppers are is part of the fun in “Vengeance Most Fowl,” a diverting low-key thriller with Bond-like flourishes that reunites Wallace and Gromit with an old adversary, the villainous mute penguin Feathers McGraw. After Wallace and Gromit helped snare him for a heist in the 1993 short “The Wrong Trousers,” Feathers was sent to the slammer, in this case a zoo draped in razor wire. There, in classic prison-film style, he keeps fit doing pull-ups — impressive given that he only has flippers — and plots a new illegal venture that draws in Wallace, Gromit, Norbot and several constables, Chief Inspector Mackintosh (Peter Kay) and P.C. Mukherjee (Lauren Patel). Bloodless danger ensues, and many jokes.
Written by Mark Burton, from a story by him and Park, “Vengeance Most Fowl” moves with smooth efficiency from its amusing, shadowy start to gently slapstick finish, propelled by its characters and Park’s customary sweet-and-silly humor. As usual, the movie is chockablock with word play and visual gags, some of which are nearly as stealthy as mice sniffing out pantry cheese (like the line “Incorporating Mad Scientist Monthly” imprinted on the cover of Practical Inventor magazine). Other jokes earn belly laughs, like the moment a wee floofy dog and its walker amble into a brilliantly timed, intricately choreographed chase sequence that demonstrates Park’s debt to immortal screen clowns like Buster Keaton.
As in Wallace and Gromit’s previous entertainments — and in innumerable films from almost the dawn of cinema — technology itself remains a leitmotif, here primarily as an endless font of anxious comedy about the contemporary world. Like other Wallace inventions, Norbot is a true machine marvel, from its creepy nutcracker-like mouth to precisely articulated arms and legs. The gnome incarnates its human creator’s desires and dreams as well as Wallace’s follies. Like Frankenstein’s monster and so many of the robots that keep stomping across our big and small screens, Norbot also seems to threaten the very life that it’s meant to help. This being a Wallace and Gromit lark, though, the scares are safely kept in check.
One of the charms of Park’s movies is that they’ve always carried the trace of the human hand, which gives the intrigue involving Norbot a distinctly self-reflexive tang. Stop-motion animation is a labor-intensive process made with three-dimensional objects, which can give the results a powerfully haptic quality. You don’t just watch these characters, you nearly feel them in your hands, like favorite childhood toys. These days, the textures look less pronounced than they did, and Wallace and Gromit also look smoother, less bumpy, pinched and creased. Yet while I don’t remember seeing any fingerprints dotting their forms this time around, the tender care that went into fashioning each of Wallace’s toothy expressions and Gromit’s quizzically raised brow remains palpable. The love, well, that you feel, too.
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 19 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
