Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

The Aardman Animations crew is back with another delightful stop-motion animated adventure featuring our favorite clueless Brit inventor and his put-upon dog.

Everything edgy eventually becomes conventional, whether it’s music, politics or movies.

The early Aardman Animations efforts were quirky, puckish stop-motion animation with a distinctly British lilt. They’ve reached the point where they’re cinematic comfort food, familiar slices of homespun confection made to delight audiences from age 3 to 103.

“Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl” is the sixth in the W&G series featuring our favorite clueless English inventor and his put-upon dog, who never speaks but is clearly the real brains of the duo. Though it’s hard for me to believe, this is just the second feature-length film and the first since 2005’s “Curse of the Were-Rabbit.”

The animation style of W&G remains stubbornly anachronistic, very old-fashioned claymation-style where you can practically see the little divots and flaws in the sculpted figures. I half expect co-director and chief custodian Nick Park insisted on keeping these into the mix.

The dynamic of Wallace & Gromit is fixed and constant. Wallace (voice of Ben Whitehead) is a bumbling, bubble-headed inventor of mostly useless trinkets and gadgets. He’s a very typical middle-classed Brit, favoring sweater vests and a rigid daily routine. His inventions often backfire on him in very predictable ways that he’s too dense to foresee. Wallace is very smart with hardware but is very dumb when it comes to other humans.

His closest (read: only) connection is with Gromit, an anthropomorphized Beagle who is more his best friend and companion than pet. Despite being wordless, Gromit seems to navigate Wallace’s technology effortlessly, acting as his chief henchman and moral conscience.

Although he often seems exasperated by his human’s dimwitted activities, Gromit’s saving grace is that he is utterly devoted to Wallace and will do anything for him.

The story setup here is that Wallace becomes fixated on all the daily chores around the house, despite having complicated gadgets to do everything from give him a bath to make his toast. He winds up creating a robot resembling one of those lawn gnomes, which he dubs Norbot (Reece Shearsmith), who can do everything from gardening to the laundry. The idea is to rent him out to the neighbors to make a little cash.

Unfortunately, Norbot’s computer brain gets switched from “good” to “evil,” and the first thing he does is create an army of copies of himself, and soon everything has gone all higgledy-piggledy.

The police are brought onto the case, including Chief Mackintosh (Peter Kay), who is about to retire and has a tendency toward argle-bargle pronouncements. Fortunately young officer Mukherjee (Lauren Patel) is, much like Gromit, savvier than her ostensible superior.

Feathers McGraw, a criminal mastermind who has previously appeared in the Wallace & Gromit films, is back again, having escaped from prison and cleverly sabotaging the original Norbot. A penguin, like Gromit he prefers to let his actions do his talking.

There’s also a whole McGuffin-style subplot involving the Blue Diamond, the most precious jewel in the world, which Feathers is still after despite being previously foiled by Mackintosh in an earlier outing.

The humor is deliberately corny, the physical humor firmly in the Keystone Kops territory of pratfalls and goofy expressions. Park co-directed with Merlin Crossingham, screenplay by Mark Burton from a story by Park and Burton.

Everything old is new again, and personally I hope they keep cranking out “Wallace & Gromit” and “Shaun the Sheep” movies for another 30 years.

“Vengeance Most Fowl” will be released in theaters Dec. 18 for a limited run before appearing on Netflix Jan. 3.