“Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl” delights start to finish   

British director Nick Park created the immensely entertaining, stop-motion clay animation of Wallace & Gromit in 1991. Park's first installment in the duo's delightful adventures, "A Grand Day Out," received an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Short Film. Then, in 2005, Park’s Aardman Animations released the first Wallace and Gromit feature, “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit,” winning an Oscar.

It gives me great pleasure to say that in the sixth celebration of this inimitable pair, "Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl," Park's creative and incisive humor still achieves his high standards for humor and relevance. In it, still living at 62 West Wallaby Street, Wigan, Lancashire verbose inventor Wallace and his silent, but exceedingly expressive, faithful beagle companion Gromit take on a new, formidable challenge.

Always concocting increasingly outlandish devices, most intended to save energy so he can devote more time to his beloved Wensleydale cheese with crackers, plus toast and jam, Wallace programs an apparently submissive robot gnome, named Norbot. Launching, as usual, a handy-dandy business maximizing Norbot's efficiency, Wallace loses control to his nemesis, the sociopath Feathers McGraw. That penguin returns from the city zoo, where he ended up at the conclusion of "The Wrong Trousers," to steal—finally, he hopes—the priceless blue diamond. In the process, Feathers will cause maximum chaos through hundreds of cloned, evil Norbots.

Revisiting previous characters enhances the narrative, each reprising their previous personalities. Welcome back into the mayhem Inspector Mackintosh, junior officer PC Mukherjee, and TV news journalist Onya Doorstep, a news presenter for Up North News. However, the enduring amusement resides with Wallace and Gromit. Of note, the embedded AI content adds disturbing relevance to the pandemonium, especially with the monotone, HAL creepy voice for the evil Norbot. In that area, all the voices are superb interpretations of the characters.

To be sure, as with the best comedies, the sugar-coated amusement, rather like Norbot, disguises a pointed critique of the real world. Already lining up awards with nominations for many more, "Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl" is available now.