Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl review – first they came for the trousers. Then they came for the robot gnome

This Christmas, the BBC are giving us a cracker: the first new Wallace and Gromit for 16 years. It has all the trimmings: Nick Park as co-director; a starring role for the Pontcysyllte aqueduct; cheese. But before its 25 December TV debut, the new film premieres at the American Film Institute festival in Los Angeles – presumably to enable an Oscar run next year.

But perhaps there’s another reason. For a Halloween premiere feels yet more fitting than a festive one. Wallace and Gromit, lest we forget, has always been surprisingly frightening. The Wrong Trousers was a classic noir, all oblique angles and chiaroscuro. The Curse of the Were-Rabbit featured brainwashing and a vampiric bunny as big as a bus. In A Matter of Loaf and Death, Wallace was romanced by a serial killer. In A Close Shave, he was nearly minced.

Their latest outing ups the aaargh! ante even higher by bringing back one of cinema’s most sinister villains: Feathers McGraw, the penguin who hijacked Wallace’s automatic slacks in The Wrong Trousers to commit a jewel heist. Feathers – dead-eyed, impassive, brimful of an unfathomable evil – was sentenced to substantial zoo time following the robbery. From there he plots both escape and revenge by remotely hacking Wallace’s latest time-saving invention: Norbot, a robot gnome with rictus enthusiasm for topiary and mopping.

Vengeance Most Fowl sags a little at the start. With a 79-minute running time, the gag rate feels slightly slack, the exposition a touch sluggish. A couple of inept coppers, voiced by Peter Kay and Lauren Patel, are too Postman Pat for comfort. But once swivel-headed Norbot (Reece Shearsmith, terrifying) is powered up, the show is back on the road and the film trips happily down familiar paths. There’s Wallace’s misplaced faith in the sunlit uplands of tech advancement; his tin-eared rejection of faithful Gromit in favour of a high-maintenance interloper; both man and dog accused of a crime they didn’t commit and able to clear their names only by finding the real culprit.

There is comfort and joy in the routine and delight in the details. Not just the thumb-smudges and dusty crockery (Wallace has become so reliant on smart tech that he keeps pressing the teapot lid, befuddled, in hope of a cuppa), but the more startling flights of fancy. Norbot gargling orgasmically as his battery is recharged. Feathers flipping through the drop-down options of Norbot’s personality: “Grumpy … boorish … bit selfish.” Magnificent bagpipes. A top nun gag. Surprisingly scabrous satire about police incompetence.

Sophisticated tech-scepticism is now a staple of children’s animation and Wallace and Gromit earn points for getting in early. Yet the high bar they set 35 years ago has been raised to dizzying levels by the likes of WALL-E and The Mitchells vs the Machines, so some of what transpires here when humans blithely let the machines take the strain here can feel creaky. The never-never-land of post war West Wallaby Street is gloriously vintage; it can also feel plain old dated.

Related: How we made Wallace and Gromit

Fowl isn’t top-tier Aardman. There’s just too much talk, and though Ben Whitehead does pitch-perfect Peter Sallis, you can grow weary of the codswallopping verbosity. It feels telling that the most compelling character is the one who remains mute and unreadable. What lingers after are the black eyes of Feathers, not Wallace’s by-gum puns. Just as the finest Aardman film is entirely silent (Shaun the Sheep the Movie, an absolute masterpiece), so too Wallace and Gromit say it best when they say nothing at all.

• Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl premieres at the AFI festival, Los Angeles, on 29 October, screens in the UK on BBC iPlayer and BBC One this Christmas and is on Netflix worldwide, outside the UK, on 3 January

• This article was amended on 28 October 2024. An earlier version misspelled Reece Shearsmith’s first name.