Wallace and Gromit’s penguin nemesis returns in teaser for new Netflix short

polygon.com:

I always breathe a sigh of relief after the announcement of a new Aardman Animation project. The studio behind some of the most imaginative stop-motion projects of the last 50 years has never been a household name or box-office titan like Walt Disney Animation, but founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton’s quirky claymation company remains just as vital to the art. So you can imagine how loudly I yelled “cheeeeeeese!” when Netflix announced a new outing for Aardman’s unofficial mascots, Wallace and Gromit.

Due out “this winter” (but positioned as a 2025 release in Netflix’s news release), Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl picks back up the well-mannered bumbling inventor Wallace and his vigilant dog Gromit standing on the edge of our current techpocalypse. Wallace, it seems, is fully Silicon Valley-pilled, and “Gromit’s concern that Wallace is becoming too dependent on his inventions proves justified,” per a synopsis. The tipping point: Wallace’s invention of an AI “smart” gnome that goes rogue. But there’s another familiar face pulling the strings: Feathers McGraw.

Introduced in the 1993 Oscar-winning short The Wrong Trousers — one of the all-time great chase movies? — Feathers is a silent criminal mastermind known to masquerade as a chicken using a red rubber glove worn as a hat. He has appeared in blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameos in other Wallace and Gromit shorts, the pair’s lone feature film, The Curse of the Wererabbit, and even the woefully under-discussed 2003 video game Wallace & Gromit in Project Zoo, but Vengeance Most Fowl is expected to give the penguin his true sequel moment, as seen in a brief teaser for the film.

While the distinctly British output from Aardman has struggled to connect with American audiences — films like The Pirates! Band of Misfits, Shaun the Sheep, and Early Man were hits around the world and blips in the States — the streaming era has been kind to the studio. Along with producing last year’s sequel to Chicken Run for Netflix,