An entertainment of one's own. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl by Nick Park, released from Aardman @aardman

It is so wonderful when grownups do their best to entertain children and the inner children in our hearts.

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024) is such a labour of love, that when you imagine all the efforts and ingenuity that went into it you almost wanted to cry.

I saw it on Netflix in Tokyo on the release day.

The opening sequence of Heath Robinson gadgets achieving feats of waking up, body washing, changing clothes, and breakfast preparation would put a smile on everyone's face. The new invention by Wallace, a robot gnome for whom "no job is too small", invokes an alarm in the viewers' mind when the AI assisted agent goes about tidying up the garden. The contrast between a more contemporary, naturalistic gardening principles and the old school geometrical garden making enforced by the gnome is cleverly slipped into the plot.

The liberal arts hight standards of the animation is evident, for example, when the disgruntled Gromit, chased away from the usual habitat by the Wallace's-favour-winning gnome, reads none other than Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own in bed.

The beauty is that the cleverness is never imposed upon the viewer. The AI alignment problem is clearly one of the themes, where an artificial agent designed with good intentions can cause unintentional havoc. The Waluigi effect, where an AI made as Luigi (a good guy) can turn into a bad guy (Waluigi) through a slight loss of balance, is one of the hidden themes of the film. Indeed, the whole film could be considered as a statement on AI safety, but the sheer entertainment value completely wraps it up, so that you don't have to notice to enjoy the story.

Children are very sensitive and they take messages with astonishing efficiency and sincerity. The fact that a number of grownups (I presume) of the Aardman clan led by the great Nick Park has produced such a sparkle joy for kids is a glimmer of hope at this otherwise gloomy turn of quarter century.

A final spoiler alert: You should take the art of old school tea making very seriously.