More or less everyone loves Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024), which makes a review surprisingly tough. The only real direction to go is up. Forget ‘best animated feature of 2024’, or ‘best Christmas viewing material in a decade’, or even ‘Oscar contender’. Vengeance Most Fowl (2024) could probably make it onto a general top 10 list of the previous year’s films – it’s that good, really. Aardman Productions are always firing on all cylinders and their latest instalment of the long-running Wallace and Gromit franchise is as good as they get. Forget great Christmas viewing, because this is more – it’s already an all-timer, an instant classic.
It’s a dark time for the world, and not just because it’s winter and Daylight Savings Time is still mystifyingly a thing. But all that is out of frame in the world of Wallace and Gromit. Fifteen years after 2008’s A Matter of Loaf and Death, it’s still the same routine as it’s been since 1989. Wallace is still the well-meaning but daft inventor of West Wallaby Street, and Gromit is still his loyally exasperated dog desperate to keep his master out of trouble and out of his carefully manicured garden. And everything is still rendered in exquisite stop-motion, built from modelling clay repositioned with love and visible fingerprints for each frame. Lighting, in particular, can be done naturally in this series in a way that no other computer or drawing-based animation can render, and with a juicy budget from Netflix, this film looks better than any previous instalment.
But the modern world has finally started to catch up with Wallace and Gromit. In Vengeance Most Fowl (2024), the most dangerous thing Wallace can invent is Norbot – an A.I. powered robotic gnome that turns to dastardly evil and – scariest of all – is voiced by Reece Shearsmith. Artificial intelligence, as in reality, hangs heavy over the film – like the theft of an artist’s artwork by an unscrupulous LLM, Gromit’s prized garden is ripped up in a matter of seconds by the industrious Norbot, to the delight of Wallace, who doesn’t realise just how much his faithful dog loves doing that work.
As always, then, Wallace and Gromit begins the film with an act of emotional idiocy of Wallace towards Gromit, and as always it builds to a heartfelt resolution between the two that’ll probably bring you to tears around the telly. Times and themes might change, and Netflix might be the studio’s partner these days instead of Dreamworks, but the basic relationship between the unthinkingly obtuse Wallace and the sensitive, hard-working Gromit is always placed first in these films. Aardman know what they’re doing.
So the chipper Norbots and their sinister-Shearsmith voices run rogue across the quiet Northern town, but who’s pulling the strings behind their evil heel-turn? Vengeance is in the title, and so enter the standout villain of the franchise to date: the returning Feathers McGraw. Narrowly beating Colin Farrell for the wickedest criminal penguin on screen in 2024, it’s a joy to see his pure malice return to Wallace and Gromit, after his capture in The Wrong Trousers (1993).
Vengeance Most Fowl (2024), then, is the first in the series to function as a direct sequel to a previous film, and that really could be a millstone around its neck. What sequel could beat that frantic chase on the model train set – or the heist sequence – or the villain? But Aardman’s got some kind of supernatural intuition, because they strike the perfect balance here too. The references to The Wrong Trousers (1993) aren’t cheap call-backs, they’re inspired – there’s a genuinely exciting vehicular chase that matches the first film, a similar invention gone terribly wrong, and a heist thriller style that this time feels a bit more James Bond than Alfred Hitchcock. It’s bigger and grander than its predecessor, and this time comes with some third-act twists to knock your Christmas-themed socks off. And all that’s done with modelling clay, the best in stop-motion tech to date, and the quiet expertise of Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham.
On top of all that clever threading of old and new, there’s plenty more to be excited for. Ben Whitehead steps perfectly into the role of Wallace after the death of Peter Sallis, and the film deals with Wallace’s confidence in his own inventing in a way that the franchise has never done before, while also being mature in handling the issue of A.I., rather than easy scaremongering.
There’s not much else to say when you’ve got a film that just gets everything right. This is probably the best-paced of the modern Wallace and Gromit films, with A Matter of Loaf and Death (2008) feeling a little short and The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) feeling a smidge long. The jokes come at a hundred miles an hour, and they’re all funny. You could pause each frame on a rewatch just to absorb the jokes you’ve lost out on the first time round. This is a rave review for a film that deserves raving about.
Still: Netflix