“This Christmas, the BBC are giving us a cracker,” said Catherine Shoard in The Guardian. “Wallace and Gromit” will be returning to the small screen for the first time in 16 years, for a full-length film with “all the trimmings”.
The hotly anticipated new film sees the return of “one of cinema’s most sinister villains”: Feathers McGraw, the “dead-eyed” penguin who has been serving time in the City Zoo following his failed jewel heist in “The Wrong Trousers”. Since then he’s been quietly “plotting his escape”, and plans to wreak vengeance on Wallace by remotely hacking his latest invention, a robotic gnome called Norbot.
“The resurrection of McGraw is magic: he’s a constant delight in this,” said Tim Robey in The Telegraph. “Adorably stoical”, the “joy” of the evil penguin comes from his “placid face” that rarely reveals a hint of emotion – save for the occasional beads of sweat that “tumble from his bowling-pin head”. He goes “neck and neck with Gromit in the ranks of British animation’s superstars”.
The “madcap chaos that unfolds” when McGraw secretly tampers with Norbot’s settings reaches the “gleeful highs” of the previous “Wallace and Gromit” films. From start to finish the “visual gags” come in “thick and fast”, and there’s a “wonderful moment” when McGraw escapes trouble by dressing up as a nun. But while the story is “nifty and smartly paced”, the dialogue is a bit of a “drag” and could do without so many “cringey puns”.
Aardman’s partnership with Netflix has unfortunately “left its mark”, said Vicky Jessop in London’s Evening Standard. The “clever jokes” are “fewer in number” in “Vengeance Most Fowl”, and the plot treads familiar ground. While it’s “plenty amusing”, the words “‘playing it safe’ spring to mind”; the film provides “chuckles, rather than belly laughs”. Still, the animation studio is “head and shoulders above everybody else when it comes to delivering the warm and fuzzies”.
Returning to the beloved animated characters is a real “treat”, said Helen O’Hara in Empire. “Gromit remains a comic masterstroke and is able to convey more feeling with a raised clay eyebrow than some actors manage in their entire career.”
It’s a “cracking claymation”, agreed Ed Potton in The Times. “There won’t be many better treats on telly – or in cinemas – this Christmas.”