The Sixth Wallace and Gromit Film, ‘Vengeance Most Fowl,’ Is the Characters’ Second Full-Length Feature

Manhattan’s estimable purveyor of art movies, old movies, and odd movies, Film Forum, will be welcoming the new year with a cautionary program — that is to say, an array of pictures about artificial intelligence. There have been a bounty of films dedicated to the subject, and were the selections in the series not already firmed up, “A.I. From Metropolis To Ex Machina … or, How the Movies Have Been Warning Us for Nearly 100 Years” could also include Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham’s “Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.”Messrs. Park and Crossingham have conjured an entertainment that has, at its center, a question that inevitably follows any advance in technology: “What could possibly go wrong?” The quandary is voiced by Wallace (Ben Whitehead), a jug-eared inventor whose common sense is forever in short supply but whose enthusiasm for cheese is unstinting. He’s an innovator on the scale of Rube Goldberg, the cartoonist who imagined extravagant devices whose purposes did not altogether justify their complications. There’s not an easy task that can’t be made more difficult through the use of applied science.Wallace and Gromit are the brainchildren of Mr. Park, a British filmmaker and animator. After employing his distinctive brand of claymation for clients as diverse as comedian Pee-wee Herman, musician Peter Gabriel, and a Danish butter concern, Mr. Park introduced to the world the hapless Wallace and his seen-it-all pooch, Gromit, in the 1989 film “A Grand Day Out.” The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was impressed enough to nominate it for Best Animated Short Film, but the award was granted to another picture, “Creature Comforts.” That film’s director? Mr. Park.Wallace, Norbot, and Gromit in ‘Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.’ Via NetflixThe Wallace and Gromit films are British to the bone, being droll, dry, and eccentric. “Vengeance Most Fowl,” the sixth film starring the duo and their second full-length feature, keys into a number of Anglicisms, including an abiding fondness for gardening, the drinking of tea as a daily ritual, and a penchant for mistaking penguins for chickens. Okay, the latter is attributable primarily to our heroes, both of whom had the bad luck to encounter the villainous penguin in “The Wrong Trousers” (1993), Feathers McGraw. Stoic, silent, and brilliant is Feathers: Who else could imagine the selective employment of a red rubber glove as a means of changing species?In their previous adventure, Wallace and Gromit prevented Feathers from making off with the famed Blue Diamond, much to the relief of the good citizenry of West Wallaby Street. The prologue to the new film details the end of that adventure and the subsequent imprisonment of Feathers at “a high security institution”: the local zoo. All is not well, however, with our heroes. A raft of bills have come due: “Inventing doesn’t come cheap, does it?” But that’s before the arrival of a towering crate. “It’s my latest invention,” Wallace avers, “a smart gnome!” Norbot (voiced by Reece Shearsmith) is a robot whose appearance, gate, and actions are as taut as they are manic. Patterned on the ornamental figurines found in yards throughout the Western Hemisphere, Norbot has been devised as a tool to help Gromit in his beloved patch of garden. When Norbot goes to work, it transforms a rambling English estate into a minimalist topiary. The neighbors, dotty to a man and woman, applaud the robot’s efficiency. The press gets wind of Wallace’s labor-saving innovation — but so, too, does a certain penguin.If no good deed goes unpunished, the same goes for Norbot and his replicas, particularly after they’re reprogrammed for nefarious purposes by Feathers. Much criminal kerfuffling follows, and our duo ends up being accused of a crime they didn’t commit. The travails that follow don’t have the intensity and invention of the culminating sprint in “The Wrong Trousers,” but the filmmakers are brilliant at simultaneously yoking genuine suspense and outright farce. The Norbot army, for instance, is a frightening thing to behold, what with its starkly lit soldiers marching in perfect syncopation and unified purpose. Children will likely find them upsetting; their parents as well, if only for the historical allusions they bring to mind.Two new characters, a walrus-mustachioed bobby heading for retirement and his ambitious young ward, are the lone misstep here. Unlike Wallace, Gromit, and, yes, Feathers McGraw, Chief Inspector McIntosh (Peter Kay) and P.C. Mukherjee (Lauren Patel) play into, rather than reshape, archetypes: These coppers could have stepped off the set of the most middlebrow of sitcoms. Otherwise, “Vengeance Most Fowl” is an ingenious confection, meticulously realized, laugh-out-loud funny, and a reminder that, much like the animation done on this film, “there’s some things that a machine can’t do.”

The Sixth Wallace and Gromit Film, ‘Vengeance Most Fowl,’ Is the Characters’ Second Full-Length Feature

More from the New York Sun

Pam Bondi Plows Past ‘Paperwork Mistake’ To Revive Criminal Prosecutions Against Letitia James and James Comey

How Margot Robbie Made Girlboss Cinema a Brand

Judge Blocks Trump Administration From Cutting Funds to California for Not Disclosing Students’ Gender Transitions to Parents

‘Wuthering Heights’ Is a Mad, Bad, and Sexy Romp That Makes Brontë ‘Brat’

Pro-Hamas Activist Provokes Outrage — by Insisting Dogs Should Be Homeless

The Democrats Beyond the Water’s Edge

Student Sues University of Michigan, Claiming It Mistook Her Anxiety-Ridden Writing Style for AI

Bipartisan Group in Congress Warns of ‘Serious Safety Risk’ From Illegal Biolabs