“That’s just an innocent nun, out for a pleasure cruise.”

Justin’s rating: I totally guessed Wallace’s password was “CHEESE”

Justin’s review: It’s been 12 soulless, heartless, bleak years without a new Wallace and Gromit film — and longer than that since Curse of the Were-Rabbit. That’s too long, my friends. Too long without the charming British claymation duo of a wacky inventor and his silent but very loyal dog.

But now the drought is over. Now we can rejoice, for Vengeance Most Fowl is here! I honestly wasn’t expecting to ever see another Wallace and Gromit outing, but the second it arrived, I assembled my children to behold its glory.

Now here’s the crazy thing: Vengeance Most Fowl is the sequel to 1993’s The Wrong Trousers. Nineteen ninety-three. That’s 31 years since a man and his best friend tangled with a super-duper evil penguin thief named Feathers McGraw. In the past three decades, Feathers has languished in a prison zoo, biding his time and waiting for the perfect opportunity… for REVENGE.

Such an opportunity arises when Wallace creates a helpful robot garden gnome named Norbot. Gromit clearly isn’t a fan of this little guy, seeing as how Norbot — and Wallace’s many other inventions — are taking away his usefulness as Man’s Best Friend.

Anyway, Feathers uses the prison computers to hack into Norbot, change its programming to evil, and spawn a few dozen more Norbots. What follows is an escalating crime plot as the Norbots covertly work to free Feathers and a decades-old theft is given a whole new dimension.

Every Wallace and Gromit film — short and long-form — delivers a wholesome package of charm and comedy, and Vengeance Most Fowl keeps this tradition alive. I didn’t find it as laugh-out-loud funny as the other ones, but I still had a goofy grin on my face throughout its increasingly ridiculous runtime. There’s just such a commitment to weirdness here, such as Feathers revealing himself by stroking a seal on his lap like a movie villain would his pet cat:

The Norbots are both creepy and funny, and there’s a great bit where the main one recharges at night in the most disturbingly annoying way possible. It’s a testament to the storytelling that you kind of love them by the end — even after being terrorized by them.

My only quibble is that everything with the two police officers feels unfunny and superfluous. That all could’ve been trimmed down to make a much more trim film.

Yeah, good stuff. Not as good as cheese and crackers, mind you, but delicious all the same. In an era where CGI makes every animated movie commonplace, the literal hand-crafted, painstaking efforts of claymation has the feel of true craftsmanship.