Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is the first feature-length movie to star the title characters in nearly 20 years, and, like most of the stop-motion-animated properties to emerge from Aardman Animations, feels like the film equivalent of a delicious, delicately made bakery good. Much of that has to do with its gently goofy sense of humor, but more, expectedly, comes from the animation itself, whose wonder hasn’t dimmed in the decades since Aardman Animations first introduced itself. There’s a palpable sense of love in these cozily designed sets and in the movement of the usually big-toothed, bulb-headed characters, which can be such a patience-testing process to capture behind the scenes that the last Wallace & Gromit movie, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, saw a day’s work result in only about 10 seconds of footage. (Vengeance Most Fowl itself took about 15 months to shoot.)

Vengeance Most Fowl calls back to the plot of 1993’s The Wrong Trousers. In that Oscar-winning short, Wallace (Peter Sallis) and Gromit had to outwit Feathers McGraw, an expressionless, unspeaking penguin criminal mastermind who attempts to use one of inventor Wallace’s inventions to steal a priceless diamond. Vengeance Most Fowl picks up a few years later, when Feathers is still in prison (i.e., locked up in a local zoo) and as hungry for that same diamond as he is in enacting revenge on the man and dog who foiled what could have been a defining triumph in his criminal career. 

Feathers catches wind of the financially struggling Wallace’s (Ben Whitehead) latest, hopefully lucrative invention — garden-gnome robots with frozen-in-place Jack Torrance grins programmed to complete unwanted housework — and figures he can use them to do his bidding. Odd related happenings around the neighborhood cast suspicions on the ever-oblivious Wallace and draw the attention of the town’s hopelessly dim police inspector (Peter Kay) and his miles-sharper new underling (Lauren Patel). Most messes have to be cleaned up by the silent, long-suffering Gromit, whose life as what amounts to an endlessly patient housewife has been made a living hell by exhaustingly cheerful gnomes that have come to ruin the easy pleasures he can depend on, from afternoon-gardening to a simple good night’s sleep. 

The parallels to AI’s corrosive encroachment on our lives giving this proudly handcrafted movie extra narrative substance, the climatically action-packed Vengeance Most Fowl is otherwise a lots-of-fun, light-on-its-feet encapsulation of what one has come to appreciate Wallace and Gromit-proper and -adjacent properties as. They’re beautifully made, snackable misadventures you wish arrived at a slightly faster clip before remembering that that pace is what’s helped them retain their consistent quality and sense of novelty. “Back when Toy Story first came out in the ’90s, a studio like us, we’re thinking, ‘Oh, boy, how long do we have left?’” the movie’s co-director, Nick Park, said recently. “But we kept going. As long as you’re telling good stories, compelling stories with compelling characters, then it’s just the technique really.” Vengeance Most Fowl is a sound argument for not having too much of a good thing.