Leave it to Aardman to turn a family-friendly animated adventure into a parable on the pitfalls of relying on technology.

In the stop-motion feature Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, the inventive crime-busters go head-to-head once again with their most formidable nemesis, Feathers McGraw — the sinister penguin who first appeared in 1993’s animated short, The Wrong Trousers. Here, Feathers sets his sights on Wallace’s latest gadget, a “smart gnome” dubbed the Nifty Oddjobbing Robot Garden Gnome, a.k.a. Norbot.

The return was years in the making, according to director Nick Park, the legendary member of the Aardman team who introduced the world to cheese enthusiast Wallace and his anthropomorphized canine companion with the Oscar-nominated A Grand Day Out in 1989. “The single-most-asked question I get is, ‘Will Feathers ever return?’” says Park. “I’ve had the idea of a film about garden gnomes turning bad for over ten years now, but I could never work out what made them bad. So, then it hit me: What if Feathers were involved?”