The thing about making a new Wallace & Gromit film is that it’s going to be compared to all the other films featuring the Northern inventor and his considerably brighter dog — a nearly unimprovable run of distinctly British delights. The good news is that this effort, featuring the return of villainous penguin Feathers McGraw from The Wrong Trousers, doesn’t let the side down, even if it doesn’t raise us to new heights either.
As we rejoin them, Wallace (voiced again to good effect by Ben Whitehead after the loss of Peter Sallis) has let his inventing run amok, outsourcing even dog-petting to one of his Rube Goldbergian devices. Gromit is fed up even before the overdue bills arrive, but Wallace has a plan: he will rent out his latest invention, a ‘smart gnome’ called Norbot (Reece Shearsmith), to pay the bills. Unfortunately, somewhere across town, the silent but ruthless criminal mastermind Feathers McGraw is plotting his revenge from a high-security zoo, and he sees an opportunity to get revenge.
It’s a fun set-up, and one that’s pacily told over a lean 79 minutes. Familiar elements of Wallace and Gromit’s outings are used well: Wallace’s tendency to abandon Gromit for his latest obsession, the dangerous downsides of high-tech gizmos, and the perfidy of penguins. The detail of the hand-crafted animation remains eternally delightful, though it feels like there are fewer background puns and less incidental humour than in, say, The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit. Perhaps strangely given the plot, the film references visible are also less genre-specific, leaning more heavily towards spy movies from Bond to Mission: Impossible, and less on, say, Cape Fear or The Fugitive. And while the final chase is thrilling and funny, it doesn’t quite have the invention of that model-train-chase the last time we saw Feathers.
And yet — it’s such a treat to return to these characters, particularly the silent pair at the heart of the action. Gromit remains a comic masterstroke, able to convey more feeling with a raised clay eyebrow than some actors manage in their entire career, while Feathers doesn’t even have that, managing to communicate a sinister sense of purpose with two beady eyes and a motionless beak. This is the kind of bad guy that not only builds an escape vehicle to enact his dastardly deeds; he installs an organ to soundtrack his plan. The film is almost at its best when Wallace is off-screen and this animation reaches its full potential, as an inventive, madcap tribute to Buster Keaton — except with a dog and a penguin locked in eternal strife.
