Aardman is back with another outing from everyone’s favourite farmyard gang: Shaun and his merry men.
Shaun the Sheep first graced our screens in 1995’s Wallace and Gromit: A Close Shave (which recently returned to cinemas in the run-up to this new picture) before getting top billing in his own much-loved CBBC show, a breakfast-time staple in my house growing up. The show’s rambunctious theme tune (featuring incredibly profound lyrics like ‘It’s Shaun the Sheep. He’s Shaun the Sheep’) was practically my alarm clock every day of the week, heralding either the mundanity and tedium of school or all the excitement of fantastic weekend, depending on the day.
Now in my twenties, with a recently renewed love for all things Wallace and Gromit and a deeper appreciation of Aardman’s brilliance, I was looking forward to returning to the farm for The Beast of Mossy Bottom. It’s a fittingly Halloweenish family flick, the kind we’re likely to get more of now that autumn has been well and truly ushered in. September is in full swing, the leaves have darkened and are already starting to make a break for it…what better time for some rural chaos and another Aardman spoof featuring madcap science and clay-based body horror?
‘Baaaa!!’
Similar to the the studio’s last venture into this territory, this is really a Frankenstein tale at heart. Shaun and company are cultivating a gorgeous pumpkin patch, hiding it from the Farmer behind a huge matte painting. That’s a nice visual gag – the opening scene would have you think the backgrounds will all feel very 2D, but then the painting gets pushed aside and we get a great big Aardman set. The pumpkins are the gang’s pride and joy, but when a visit from the local vet has the Farmer love struck and dumb, he accidentally stumbles across the patch (in both senses of the word) and wrecks the place.
With everything in tatters (except, perhaps, the taters), Shaun makes a desperate attempt to restore the patch to its former glory, studying a ‘homemade science’ book night and day in search of a quick fix. Experiments in the farm’s deserted windmill lead to the creation of a new substance – a pink goo not unlike the dancing jelly from Ghostbusters 2 – that winds up causing rapid and uncontrollable growth. Meanwhile, the besotted Farmer looks to do something about his baldness to win over his lady love, and these two threads collide to create The Beast himself, a shambling creature with hair just about everywhere.
What follows, as you’d expect from Aardman, is a well-meaning and celebratory little trip around rural England, into the local village of Mossington and beyond. ‘Don’t know what we’re cooking, but it’s made with love’ says an early pop track as the flock get up to mischief in a montage, and that love shines through in the making of the film itself. On a practical level, Aardman still know just how to build and compose warm and inviting locales just from scratch, so much so that you kind of forget that what you’re seeing was all made with human hands as opposed to something digital. That’s perhaps the biggest compliment I can give its visual style – it works and flies so well that it’s almost one of the last things you think about.
This new Aardman picture comes just a month before Wildwood, another stop-motion adventure from Laika, the studio behind Coraline and Kubo, which had a trailer in the ad roll before this screening. So much of that film’s marketing has highlighted the human element behind every frame, so much so that this new trailer was predominantly focused on everything going on behind the scenes as opposed to establishing the plot as you might expect, and I think it’s more important than ever to ensure that these productions keep making their way to cinema screens. A generative AI might claim to be able to capture the richness of such material in a fraction of the time, but both studios clearly understand that hard work and years of production – you know, from real people with mortgages and livelihoods – is impossible to match.
While I’ll always stand behind such refreshingly creative endeavours and can appreciate all the work that went into them, I did find myself wanting a little more from this third Shaun film overall. All the blueprints and elements are there for another absolute corker like Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which had me cackling throughout to the point where I nearly felt like turning around and apologising to everyone else in the room, but despite the craft at play, there’s much less of those simple sight gags that are always so fun to spot in the background, at least to my eyes.
Each Wallace and Gromit film feels like a jam-packed box of goodies and innocent fun ready to be shared with us in the audience, from off-the-wall newspaper headlines to Lancashire-themed puns on every jar, tub and cereal box. This outing feels a lot more focused on physical comedy, with slapstick, off the hoof pratfalls left right and centre. Those count for a lot – there were moments where I laughed out loud – but for as much as I wanted to be absolutely bowled over, I couldn’t help but feel a little let down by the end.
I’d forgotten that, given the fact that neither sheep nor dogs talk, Shaun the Sheep films are entirely non-verbal – even the human characters talk in grunts and groans like they’re in one of the early LEGO games. That has a certain charm to it – large stretches play out like a silent slapstick classic – but I adore Aardman’s writing more than anything else in their films, so for as much as they manage to convey what Shaun and his friends are thinking (and, at one point, quite visibly feeling), I did find myself missing the wit of the dialogue.
All that considered, this still flies as a perfectly easy watch and a quick autumnal adventure, if slightly more child-oriented than others of its ilk that came before. That’s no bad thing – I’m quite happy that the ewes of today are still finding good-natured fun with Shaun – but I was hoping for something that felt slightly less like a tried and tested safe bet. There are jokes and references in there – many that I had a good chuckle over – but it doesn’t chuck them your way anywhere near as fast as some of the absolute greats of the studio’s back-catalogue.
BBFC: Rated U for very mild threat, scary scenes, rude humour, implied bad language.
Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom is in cinemas now.
