It’s past time that I wrote about Shaun the Sheep, don’t you think? The adorable and highly tech-savvy sheep made his debut in Nick Park’s Oscar-winning 1995 stop-motion short film A Close Shave and has since embarked on a successful solo career. He has been absent from the big screen since 2015’s The Shaun the Sheep Movie — 2019’s Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon was relegated to Netflix, and his TV series is still running. (He even has a video game.) However, now he’s back in our multiplexes with Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom, a Halloween adventure that will be perfect for the kids who aren’t ready for Resident Evil yet.
If you aren’t familiar with Shaun, you should know that he lives on a farm in northern England where the people all speak gibberish. Out of his flock of sheep, he’s the one who invents crazy gadgets to attempt (not always successfully) to make his fellow sheep’s lives easier. The farm is run by a good-natured, nearsighted, nameless farmer and a sensible dog named Bitzer who is supposedly there to manage the sheep but has to boss the bumbling farmer almost as much.
It’s the farmer’s bumbling that accidentally destroys the pumpkin patch that the sheep have been keeping. With just a few days to go before Halloween and the other sheep dreaming of carving their own jack o’ lanterns, Shaun conceives an idea to supercharge the growth of some pumpkin seeds for the holiday. Unfortunately, his plan becomes entangled with the balding farmer’s plan to re-grow his hair. This results in pumpkins the size of barns and, more worryingly, the farmer’s hair growing faster than his electric razor or long strips of duct tape can remove.
Stop-motion animation is such a painstaking form that it demands plotting to match. It takes so much effort to depict, say, a character losing his hat that you need that lost hat to come back into play, or else why bother to animate it in the first place? Precise plotting was a defining feature of Park’s films and the first Shaun the Sheep movie.
We get that in this movie’s middle section, when the hair-covered, panicking farmer runs into the nearby village and is mistaken for a Bigfoot-like monster. It’s perilously close to the plot of Park’s Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, but that hardly matters given the exquisitely orchestrated chaos that follows, which includes Bitzer driving the farmer’s truck and scrupulously obeying the rules of the road even though he believes the monster is chasing him. (For non-British viewers: The “L” stickers that the dog sticks on the truck indicate that the driver is still on a learner’s permit.) Once Shaun communicates that the farmer and the monster are one and the same, the animals have to rescue him from the place they fear most — the veterinarian’s office — and then from a cargo ship where he’s to be shipped to a remote island in the Pacific.
It’s enough to make up for the overabundance of horror-movie references at the film’s beginning, as well as the more labored farce during the climax. (Funny how both this movie and Resident Evil feature characters racing against time to deliver a cure to the infected.) It also makes this installment of Shaun the Sheep a nice pairing with last spring’s The Sheep Detectives. If you’re looking to prime your kids for trick-or-treating season, I can think of worse ways.
Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom
Directed by Steve Cox and Matthew Walker. Written by Mark Burton and Giles Pilbrow. Rated PG.
