Ahead of its release on Netflix January 3, io9 visited the set of Vengeance Most Fowl to see why now is Aardman's time to return to Wallace and Gromit.

For as potent as a British cultural institution as it is, there really isn't actually that much Wallace & Gromit. Aardman's claymation adventures with the titular inventor and his canine best friend have spanned four TV moviesâ€"the last of which released in 2008â€"and a theatrical feature on the eve of celebrating its 20th anniversary. There have been moments sinceâ€"shorts, advertisement appearances around the world, video games, and a plethora of transmedia talesâ€"but by and large, generations of fans have grown up alongside just a handful of films. Handmade stop-motion animation takes time, but even then, Aardman took plenty of it to ponder a return to Wallace & Gromit, and to wonder just how and what that would look like.

Audiences will find out the answer to that question in about a month and a half with the release of Vengeance Most Fowl. The second feature-length entry in the series since 2004's Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Vengeance is not just the first major Wallace & Gromit film Aardman has undertaken since 2008's Matter of Loaf & Death, it is the first of its kind in what has been an era of evolution for the beloved studio. Vengeance Most Fowl is the second major release as part of Aardman's deal with streaming giant Netflix, which began with the release of a sequel to its similarly beloved 2000 movie Chicken Run, Dawn of the Nugget, in 2023.

It's a series of firsts for Wallace & Gromit as a franchise, as well. It's the first in the series to extensively incorporate digital VFX alongside its traditional stop-motion animation, worked on by a crew of over 200, and the first since Aardman became employee-owned in 2018. It's the first major project to not feature beloved British actor Peter Sallis as Wallace, following his death in 2017, with performer Ben Whitehead taking over the role.

So returning to Wallace & Gromit now, with a studio that has evolved so much since it last ventured to West Wallaby Streetâ€"expanding other franchise like the Wallace spinoff Shaun the Sheep, creating original stories like 2018's Early Manâ€"was both a coming home for Aardman, and a chance to put lessons the studio had learned in their time away from Wallace & Gromit into practice on their most famous and beloved series.

"We've been making other things. And as a studio of this size, we can't shoot two things at onceâ€"we're a 'one film at a time'-size studio, so there's been a practical reason [it's taken so long to return to Wallace]," Merlin Crossingham, Vengeance Most Fowl's co-director and creative director for Wallace & Gromit at large, told io9 and other gathered journalists at Aardman's studio in Bristol, England, this past summer as Vengeance Most Fowl wound down its final days of shooting. "But it also came down to Nick [Park], as the driving force and creator of Wallace & Gromit, was focused on Early Man. That took up a big chunk of time since Loaf & Death in 2008. That, combined with getting everything ready and lined up, it wasn't like 'oh we're not going to make [a new] Wallace & Gromit,' because there's always been a demand for more Wallace & Gromit. It was just, 'oh, we're ready, the idea is ready.' It kind of sort of just happenedâ€"I'm not sure there was a conscious decision to hold it back, or to force it."

But part of why it took so long is another first in that Vengeance Most Fowl breaks a major series tradition. It's the first outright "sequel" story Aardman has ever told in Wallace & Gromit, anchored around the return of one of its most iconic villains: The Wrong Trousers' Feathers McGraw, the dastardly penguin thief and con artist whose sole 1993 appearance sealed him into animation canon as one of the greatest cinematic villains of our time. The simple reason Aardman needed him? He's what made the rest of Vengeance Most Fowl click.

"In general we don't bring characters back. We like them to exist in the films that they were in, and create new ones for new for new films," Crossingham said of the decision to bring Feathers back. "The early origins of Vengeance Most Fowl, Feathers was not part of. Nick and Mark Burton, the screenwriter... Nick had this idea bubbling away in his sketchbooks since Were-Rabbit times. Ideas come and go, and one finds its own kind of confidenceâ€"and at the time it was just a story about Wallace and his latest invention, a smart gnome." But according to Crossingham, the idea as-is couldn't sustain even Wallace & Gromit's usual half-hour TV movie structure.

"It just didn't generate enough jeopardy in its own right," Crossingham reflected. "No one can quite remember how the suggestion of Feathers being involved came around, but it was like a lightbulb moment, and it gave it a reason to bring the darkness, bring the jeopardy, and to bring a good villain back. It was really story-driven, and it answered a lot of story conundrums that existed early on in the scripting process. And it just happens that one of the number one questions we get asked by fans is 'When is Feathers McGraw coming back?', so it's very nice to answer that question, but we weren't giving service to those fans. It was really a genuine story solution."

"Wallace & Gromit never really went away. They've always been on the back burner, and waiting for the next big idea, really," Park added. "That's what prompts us to make another movie, is when we feel like we've got that idea that really screams out at you, almost demanding to be made. This one's been a long time in the making... we were working with [the gnome idea] for a quite a while, kicking it around, and then it just seemed like it needed an extra darkness in the story. Some kind of bigger conflict, actual motivation. That's when Feathers was there as a gift."

But as key as Feathers' return is to Vengeance Most Fowl, there is more to the story than the return of a criminal penguin. One thing that had fascinated Park and Crossingham from even the earliest ideas is felt keenly throughout the new film: examining how much time has changed in both our own world and Wallace's in our relationship to, and dependence on, technology.

"It's very much technology in Wallace's world, so I think it's relevant and pertinent to technology that is on a massive sort of acceleration in the world around us," Crossingham continued. "We do touch on it, but it's more about our relationship to technology, and how it affects Wallace and Gromit's relationship. Technology in their world is crazy inventions rather than artificial intelligence, or anything like that, but thematically I think it's very contemporary. I think the way Vengeance asks questions of, 'technology is great, but who's in control?'â€"those kind of light-touch questions are looked at thematically throughout our film."

"We enter the story with Gromit already getting fed up with Wallace's inventions and feeling alone, almost an orphan, really," Park added. In Vengeance Most Fowl, this is represented by Wallace's latest gadget, Norbot (voiced by Inside No. 9's Reece Shearsmith). A "Smart Gnome" Wallace initially creates to help Gromit around the gardenâ€"not realizing in his tech obsession that the garden is Gromit's escape from his master's gadgetsâ€"Norbot comes to represent the perfect bridge of telling a contemporary Wallace & Gromit story about technology and its perils, while still feeling in lockstep with the "low-tech" charm of the world the franchise has existed in from the very beginning.

"It's metaphorical of Wallace, really," Park continued. "Wallace is making stuff that, a lot of the time... I'm not saying that technology [at large] is bad, but there's a lot that just seems so unnecessary, and Norbot is a comment on that. On how such a lot of technology is a distraction from life and relationships."

In many ways, Norbot is of a piece with smart home technology we have in our lives todayâ€"part Roomba, part voice assistantâ€"just extrapolated into a fanciful, quaintly British form for a reality where computers, the internet, and mobile phones still don't really exist the way they do in our lives, even as Vengeance Most Fowl begins to make acquiescences to that technological reality simply by being a story told in the here and now, rather than a decade and a half ago.

"It was a big discussion, because Wallace & Gromit exists in a time gone byâ€"non-specific, but a time gone by. Historically they haven't really had computing technologies that we know of," Crossingham said of the series' tech divide. "There were jokes early on [in development], scenes or set pieces that leaned into tablet devices and things like that where we went 'oh hang on, that feels a bit too now.'" But that's not stopped time from marching on for the duo as it has for us. "You'll see in the film, Wallace and Gromit do have a computer now, but it's a weird hybrid of early '60s and '70s, tape-driven kinds of computers, and slightly 1980s keyboards. It's nothing specific but should look to today's eyes like a heritage computing system. Finding that balance was really critical, so it felt appropriate to their world."

"Everybody who's going to watch this film has, hopefully, had some interactions with computers, and knows where we're going with it and what we've done," Crossingham continued. "Some young kids might not recognize a big monitor that is wide and deep, but you know, most people will get it."

"Wallace's world is a little bit more old-fashioned, so it was something we had to just lean into and hope people buy the fact that Wallace could create an AI [like Norbot]. When I first pitched the idea to Mark, that was the first thing that he picked up on, and was so interested in," Park added. "That's more technical, but [Vengeance] is more about the human relationships, and how tech gets in the way."

It's in that balance between the charms of tradition and the necessity of telling a story about a tech-addict inventor in 2024 that Aardman sees something of a kinship with its creation, behind the cameras. While wandering the floors of the studio and seeing glimpses of animators wrapping up their final shots, it was clear that hand-made tactility was a priority for Aardman's work on Vengeance Most Fowl. But the studio was also keen to show how much its own technological world and pipeline has grown in the years since they last worked on Wallace & Gromit to help keep supporting their focus on hand-animated material.

"We've developed great model-making techniques for using rapid prototyping, for mould-making processes and casting," Crossingham explained of Aardman's pipeline. "Some of the props will be handmade, scanned, and then if we need to do many iterations, they'll be 3D printed and painted out. It's a great tool, but we still start with the hand-craftedness. That's the same in front of the camera as wellâ€"we used to shoot on 35mm film, we now shoot on digital cameras and we have a digital image pipeline in the studio. That does speed things up, but the starting point of it being hand-crafted is really important to us."

But much like their clay heroes, Aardman isn't afraid of using technology to the benefit of the craft. "We try and shoot everything in camera on set as a first port of call, but if that's not possible, then we look at what the alternatives are," Crossingham continued. "We're really lucky at Aardman that we have basically every single modern filmmaking tool at our disposal. We've got a very big toy box, and we use every toy in the box, but we use it contextually so that it always feels right to, in this case, the world of Wallace & Gromit."

For Vengeance Most Fowl, that technological enhancement comes to a climax in the film's third act, which features an elaborate, water-based chase sequence in a quaint, quintessentially British canal boatâ€"which, traditionally shot, would've required using techniques like plastic wrap to recreate the texture and sheen of water. "A classic one in stop-motion is things like smoke, steam, waterâ€"particle effects," Crossingham explained. "Those [VFX] technologies have advanced so much in recent years that even if we were making this film just a few years ago, we couldn't do in visual effects what we're bringing to this story. As filmmakers, the only reason we haven't done it before is because we couldn't, but now we can, so we are... the biggest challenge has been making those new tools feel like they're appropriate to the world, and not to have the potentially glossy, glitzy CG-ness impact on the environment."

"We've always had elaborate setpieces, but now you don't have to build everything," Park continued. "You don't have to build half of Yorkshire. It would've been a lot [in the climax] to useâ€"it would've been out of the question to use cling film or saran wrap [for the water]. "That's the use. It's the heart and soul of it, that is important for us to stick with the clay, especially with the characters and the facial expressions. We don't apologize for the thumbprints."

"We embrace the imperfections," Crossingham concluded.

It's in that willingness to support Wallace & Gromit's anachronismâ€"its traditional, old-English charm and a world without much of our modern technology, telling a story about a man whosee first appearance involved casually building a rocket ship in his basement to go to the moon, as well as the charm of its stop-motion claymation, now supported and enhanced by technology in front and behind the cameraâ€"that, for Park and Crossingham, is part of why the series has endured even as its existence has largely been built on the backs of small-scale, intimate stories. Now, returning to cinematic ambition, and with the support of Netflix, Wallace & Gromit has the opportunity to evolve again, as the industry has blurred the lines between movie and TV experiences since we last saw these characters back in 2008, while still providing them the nostalgic comfort of what Aardman's lens into British life represents.

"We do try to appeal to that side of people, it does relate to that nostalgic feel. The setting [of Wallace & Gromit] is often just very cozy, and mundane, and domesticâ€"and yet any incredible adventure could come out of that. It's the contrast of the two," Park ruminated. Time will tell if Vengeance Most Fowl's mix of the old and new will click with audiences as much as prior Wallace & Gromit films have. Regardless, of just how well audiences receive itâ€"as of writing, the film is sitting at a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating from critics reviewsâ€"it's clear that the series' willingness to balance tradition and advancement is what has kept it ticking away outside of the spotlight for all these years, and keep it going for many more years beyond this latest addition to the Wallace & Gromit canon.

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl will stream on Netflix internationally starting January 3, 2025. It will broadcast initially in the UK and Ireland on the BBC at a currently undisclosed date.