Wallace & Gromit review: Another triumph of pure British silliness, fused with pure British genius writes BRIAN VINER

Judgement:

Nearly twenty years have passed since Wallace & Gromit’s first feature, 2005’s The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit.

So blow the trumpets, sing hosannas and, if you feel like it, spin the cartwheels… because finally here’s the second, and it’s another triumph of pure British folly fused with pure British genius.

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

It’s a joy. If you have any concerns, I can almost guarantee that this movie will wash them away for 79 minutes.

Park, an unfailingly modest fellow, will no doubt try to direct the praise to screenwriter Mark Burton and all the brilliant stop-motion animators at Aardman, the Bristol studio where ‘clay feet’ suggests not a character flaw but a month’s hard work. work. They have also outdone themselves.

The creators of accident-prone, cheese-loving inventor Wallace and his faithful beagle Gromit have even outdone themselves

Wallace, voiced by Ben Whitehead, replaces the late Peter Sallis but sounds very much like him. Wallace is his usual self, living with Gromit on West Wallaby Street, surrounded by a plethora of crazy Heath Robinson-style gadgets just to get him up in the morning. .

He remains a civilian hero after the events of the Oscar-winning short film The Wrong Pants (1993), in which he foiled sinister criminal mastermind (and penguin) Feathers McGraw’s plan to steal a priceless diamond.

Feathers are still safely whisked away at the zoo – ‘literally doing a bird’ – but now he uses his devilish cunning to take revenge on Wallace and squeeze the gem again.

Feathers soon gets the chance to, yes, kill two birds with one stone. Wallace has invented a robotic garden gnome named Norbot (voiced by Reece Shearsmith), a gardening “smart gnome” who, as a way to deal with rising invention costs, is rented out to the neighbors and becomes a local fixture as he potters around. in his ‘Gnome Improvements’ van.

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

Needless to add, the dastardly penguin also escapes from captivity, again by attaching a red rubber glove to his head and pretending to be a chicken.

With Norbot causing garden-related destruction across the city, Wallace’s name is mud. He is even named and shamed on television, on Up North News (hosted by ‘Anton Deck’). So when the diamond goes missing, he inevitably becomes the prime suspect.

Fortunately, dimwitted 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, who puts his reading material aside. (A Room Of One’s Own by Virginia Woof) to save the reputation of his unfortunate master.

It deftly combines our modern world of advanced computer science and multi-ethnicity, with a world that feels reassuringly old-fashioned. What a huge and welcome treat!

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is on BBC1 and BBC iPlayer this Christmas

It all culminates in a canal boat chase across the Yorkshire/Lancashire border, one of the most cherishingly funny action scenes I’ve seen in years, on par with the epic train chase in The Wrong Pants.

Northerners in particular (and I write this as a proud Lancastrian) will enjoy the jokes (‘No Parkin’ made me laugh out loud), while film literates will also have a blast, with glorious tongue-in-cheek references to the Bond films, The Italian Job, even the African queen.

Sometimes the ingenuity of Park and Burton, and that army of animators, is breathtaking.

What’s also clever about Vengeance Most Fowl, as with all Aardman films but perhaps more so than most, is that it works beautifully for a young audience unlikely to appreciate Wallace’s malapropisms (“necessity is the mother-in-law of invention’), while appealing to adults in countless other ways.

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

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