Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl review: a joyful start to 2025

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You’d never know from watching Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl that it’s been nearly 20 years since The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, the franchise’s last feature film, hit theaters. The long-running stop-motion animated series’ latest entry slips so effortlessly back into its signature screwball, charming groove that it’s hard to believe the Netflix film is technically a sequel to a movie that came out back when Netflix was still nothing more than a DVD rental service. A lot has changed since viewers last saw Wallace and Gromit, but the pair remain — like so many other iconic screen duos — timelessly funny and endearing.

Vengeance Most Fowl never quite matches its franchise’s highest highs, but it comfortably delivers many of the same kinds of laughs, visual gags, and cozy details that have elevated Wallace and Gromit’s kooky adventures from the very beginning. It’s a film that knows how to make the most out of what it’s got — whether that be a silent, mean-mugging penguin or a journalist with a minor narrative role whose name is the perfectly cheeky “Onya Doorstep.” It’s also a sequel with a lot on its mind, and it isn’t particularly subtle in communicating its ideas about the dangers that technology and AI pose to the deeply human connections, including those between a man and his dog, that keep us all together.

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl begins by flashing back to the night that its heroes helped catch the would-be diamond thief known as “Feathers McGraw” at the end of the Oscar-winning 1993 short film The Wrong Trousers. The film then follows the penguin as he spends his next many years living a prison-like existence in a local zoo, working out, silently loathing his arrogant guards, and waiting for the moment when he can finally enact some vengeance on the man and dog who put him away. This opening sequence proves to be the perfect intro to Vengeance Most Fowl, a film that rarely fails to tell its story in as economical and humorous a fashion as possible. All it takes is co-directors Merlin Crossingham and Wallace & Gromit creator Nick Park’s first canted close-up of Feathers’ silently scowling penguin face to realize what funny, safe hands you’re in.

Feathers gets the chance he’s been waiting for when the ever-eccentric, aloof Wallace (voiced here by Ben Whitehead, who comfortably steps into the late, great Peter Sallis’ shoes) ignores his loyal companion Gromit’s growing dislike of his inventions and invents a robotic garden gnome named Norbot (Reece Shearsmith). Wallace initially creates Norbot to help Gromit manage his garden, but it isn’t long before he’s decided to use the robot as a much-needed source of income by leasing him out to his neighbors. In doing so, Wallace unwittingly creates a window for Feathers to not only reinsert himself back into his enemies’ lives, but also mastermind his long-awaited escape from his zoo prison by stealthily reprogramming Norbot and his many copies.

This premise is utterly absurd, and Vengeance Most Fowl knows it. The film has a lot of fun running wild with its technology-gone-wrong plot — filling its second act with plenty of inspired, Silent Era-esque visuals involving an army of off-putting gnome robots. Park and Crossingham pack Vengeance Most Fowl to the brim with so many funny details and images that you may be inclined to rewatch it simply to see what you missed the first time. Feathers’ long-distance hacking of Norbot’s artificial brain, for instance, includes a quick shot of the villainous penguin scrolling through the robot’s attitude settings, which range from “pleasant” to “bit selfish” to “really nasty” and, ultimately, “evil.” Like the Paddington films and a few other, modern British comedies, Vengeance Most Fowl finds the right balance between its dry English sense of humor and the kind of blunt-edged, yet clever comedic gags that would make iconic screen comedians like Buster Keaton and W.C. Fields proud.

It isn’t long before Gromit ends up embarking on a solo adventure that, thanks to the character’s dialogue-free persona, allows Vengeance Most Fowl to let its visual playfulness take center stage. Amid all of its many entertaining stop-motion set pieces, though, the film manages to thematically tie its ridiculous heist-revenge story together by exploring the fissure created between Wallace and Gromit by the former’s growing dependence on his machines. This subplot isn’t easy to miss, not with Wallace repeatedly and obliviously raving about the merits of a technology-reliant lifestyle in Vengeance Most Fowl‘s first act. The film’s clearly modern ideas about the worrisome nature of AInonetheless strike a surprisingly emotional chord.

This is due in no small part to Vengeance Most Fowl‘s stunning stop-motion animation, which is employed particularly well in its opening 10 minutes. This section of the film reintroduces viewers to Feathers, Wallace, and Gromit, and the animation team’s masterful ability to communicate Gromit’s emotions and reactions using just his eyebrows, eyes, and ears makes it easy to grasp the distance, disappointment, and loneliness that he feels because of his owner’s obsession with technology. Few could have ever predicted that Vengeance Most Fowl would explore AI of all things, but by showing the many deeply felt ways that automation and AI threaten to irrevocably separate its lovable leads, the film successfully highlights how easily and unnoticeably technology can come between us and even those we love most.

Vengeance Most Fowl is so keyed into its lead characters’ strained relationship that, outside of one fairly forgettable B-plot involving a rookie cop and her halfway-out-the-door boss, it rarely explores the world beyond Wallace and Gromit’s home. This can make the film feel surprisingly insular at times, despite how lovingly all of its individual frames are brought to life. Fortunately, the comedy saves its biggest set pieces and most beautiful images for its finale, which sends Vengeance Most Fowl out on a high note. Its flaws are, in other words, minimal, and while it almost never exceeds its franchise’s set standards, the film delivers everything that preexisting fans might expect and so much more than newbies ever possibly could. It’s an exciting, welcome jolt of fun and good humor to kick off the new year.

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is streaming now on Netflix.