Wallace & Gromit review: Another triumph of pure British silliness

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Almost two decades have passed since the first feature-length Wallace & Gromit film, 2005’s The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit.

So sound trumpets, sing hosannas and, if you’re up to it, turn cartwheels... because at long last here’s the second one, and it’s another triumph of pure British silliness, fused with pure British genius.

In an era in which you don’t have to do much more than host a TV reality show to be hailed as a national treasure, Nick Park CBE is the genuine article. And in conceiving and directing Vengeance Most Fowl, the creator of accident-prone, cheese-loving inventor Wallace and his loyal beagle Gromit has excelled even himself.

It is a joy. If you have cares, I can all but guarantee that for 79 minutes, this film will wash them clean away.

An unfailingly modest fellow, Park will doubtless try to re-direct the plaudits towards screenwriter Mark Burton and all the brilliant stop-motion animators at Aardman, the Bristol studio where ‘feet of clay’ does not suggest a character flaw, but a month’s hard work. They have excelled themselves, too.

Voiced by Ben Whitehead, replacing the late Peter Sallis but sounding very much like him, Wallace is his old familiar self, living with Gromit in West Wallaby Street surrounded by a plethora of daft Heath Robinson-style gadgets merely to get him up in the morning.

He remains a civic hero following the events of Oscar-winning short The Wrong Trousers (1993), in which he foiled the scheme of sinister criminal mastermind (and penguin) Feathers McGraw to steal a priceless diamond.

Feathers is still safely banged away in the zoo – ‘literally doing bird’ – but now he is using his devilish craftiness to take revenge on Wallace and pinch the gem again.

Soon Feathers gets his chance to, yes, kill two birds with one stone. Wallace has invented a robotic garden gnome called Norbot (voiced by Reece Shearsmith), a gardening ‘smart-gnome’ which, as a way of dealing with mounting invention expenses, is hired out to the neighbours, becoming a local fixture as it chugs around in its ‘Gnome Improvements’ van.

But computer-hacking is one of Feathers’ many nefarious skills and he devises a way to re-programme the ever-cheerful Norbot as downright evil.

Needless to add, the dastardly penguin also escapes from captivity, again by fixing a red rubber glove on his head and posing as a chicken.

With Norbot now wreaking garden-related havoc around town, Wallace’s name is mud. He is even named and shamed on television, in Up North News (presented by ‘Anton Deck’). So inevitably, when the diamond goes missing, he becomes the chief suspect. 

Luckily, dim-witted Chief Inspector Mackintosh (Peter Kay, reprising his role from The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit) has a smarter sidekick, PC Mukherjee (Lauren Patel), while Wallace of course has the resourceful Gromit, putting aside his reading matter (A Room Of One’s Own by Virginia Woof) to rescue the reputation of his hapless master.

It all culminates in a canal boat chase across the Yorkshire-Lancashire border that is one of the most cherishably funny action sequences I’ve seen in years, comparable with the epic train chase in The Wrong Trousers. 

Northerners in particular (and I write as a proud Lancastrian) will relish the gags (‘No Parkin’ made me laugh out loud) while the cine-literate are indulged too, with glorious tongue-in-cheek references to the Bond films, The Italian Job, even The African Queen.

At times, the ingenuity of Park, and Burton, and that army of animators, takes the breath away.

What’s also so clever about Vengeance Most Fowl, as with all the Aardman features but perhaps even more than most, is that it works beautifully for a young audience who probably won’t appreciate Wallace’s malapropisms (‘necessity is the mother-in-law of invention’), while appealing in myriad other ways to grown-ups.

And it deftly marries our modern world of advanced computer science and multi-ethnicity, with one that feels comfortingly old-fashioned. What a huge and welcome treat!

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl will be on BBC1 and BBC iPlayer this Christmas.