Just about 31 years ago, a kindly inventor who loves cheese and his intelligent, all-too patient dog dealt with true evil. That is, evil in the form of a penguin who dresses up as a chicken, of course. The Wrong Trousers, the second Aardman Animations short to feature Wallace & Gromit, won the Oscar for best animated short in 1994 and is still maybe the best animated short I’ve ever seen. In it, the duo invents a pair of robotic slacks that eventually go haywire, while at the same time an evil penguin tries to kill them.
That bad bird, Feathers McGraw, is back in the first teaser for Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. Check it out below.
We don’t get a ton from this teaser, but we know it’ll be a feature film follow-up to The Wrong Trousers and will also see Wallace and Gromit invent a robot gnome named Norbot. This marks only the second feature film with the perennial stop-motion team following the Oscar-winning The Curse of the Were-Rabbit in 2006. Other shorts in the franchise include 1989’s A Grand Day Out, 1995’s A Close Shave, and 2008’s A Matter of Loaf and Death.
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl will premiere January 3, 2025, on Netflix. The official synopsis is below.
Gromit’s concern that Wallace is becoming too dependent on his inventions proves justified, when Wallace invents a “smart” gnome that seems to develop a mind of its own. When it emerges that a vengeful figure from the past might be masterminding things, it falls to Gromit to battle sinister forces and save his master… or Wallace may never be able to invent again!
Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.
