This review is being re-posted to coincide with its U.S. release.
Aardman’s wonderful plasticine productions have never worked quite as well in the cinema as they do on television. In part that’s because their television work includes the immaculate The Wrong Trousers, arguably the most perfectly paced and ambitiously staged animated shorts ever produced. And that’s to say nothing of the animated trousers, boom boom. Transitioning to the big screen has meant stretching out half-hour plots to feature length, which works against Aardman’s strength for creating small, self-contained pieces packed to the brim with exquisite visual punnery and telling stories more through animation than plotting. Chicken Run and Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientist both suffered from meandering stretches, offering enough visual wonder to make a wonderful trailer but not quite so capable at filling in the bits inbetween. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit remains their finest cinematic outing to date, in no small part down to the studio’s practiced expertise at setting out the rhythms of a story featuring their signature creations and laser-focus on spoofing one specific genre rather than firing in all directions and hoping for a hit.
Shaun The Sheep Movie (not, for whatever reason, Shaun The Sheep: The Movie, but I digress) also derives from one of Aardman’s television hits, itself an offshoot of the Wallace & Gromit empire – specifically, the sheep from A Close Shave. The show is aimed at a noticeably younger audience than Wallace and the same is true of the movie. When a movie is classified ‘for all ages’, generally you can expect it to be aimed at children from, say, 6-12 years old. Shaun is the rare movie which skews even younger, though thanks to Aardman’s gift for universal humour and soul-enriching animation, it is more than happy to whisk you back to the halcyon days of childhood even if you find yourself a few decades above the age requirements.
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Shaun the Sheep Movie
Directors: Richard Starzak and Mark Burton
Rating: G
Release Date: February 6, 2015 (UK)
Growing out of the same formula which guides each of the 7-minute TV show episodes, the movie sees Shaun and his flock eager from a day off from their usual routine and having to escape the watchful eye of their farmer (called, ambitiously, ‘Farmer’) and his dog, Bitzer. On this occasion, events go a little more awry than expected and Farmer contrives to end up asleep in an out-of-control caravan that takes him to the Big City, where a bump on the head leads to him contracting amnesia and believing himself a celebrity hairdresser. With no-one to feed or look after them, and some naughty pigs wrecking havoc inside the farmhouse, the flock decides to go and get Farmer back, having to avoid the city’s devious Animal Containment officer along the way.
As is probably clear from that description, the plot is not especially tight and the usual Aardman problems in maintaining pace apply. Between a number of truly inspired skits where the sheep try to blend into city life, the movie largely grinds to a halt whenever the Farmer becomes the focus. This shortcoming was made especially clear by a child in the row in front of me, who was enraptured every time the sheep took to the screen but quickly became distracted whenever the altogether less fluffy humans took their turn. Turns out no-one can deliver trenchant film criticism like a disinterested toddler.
Fortunately, the sheep sections are more than strong enough to make up for those shortcomings and as you’d expect from Aardman, there is no shortage of wonderfully staged slapstick set-pieces on offer. The flock’s infiltration of an upmarket restaurant, dressed in poorly matched clothing from a local charity shop, is an absolute joy as the sheep attempt to blend in by imitating the etiquette of their fellow diners. A scene at a junkyard where the sheep serenade Timmy the lamb into feeling better is funny enough until you realise they’ve formed a baaa-bershop quartet, a detail so immaculate and quietly played you’d be quite forgiven for bursting out into spontaneous applause.
Aardman excel in such details and while it’s disappointing to see the city’s shops so generically signed (‘Butcher’, ‘Newsagent’, etc) considering how much fun can usually be had from picking out the background puns in the Wallace pictures, there’s plenty of visual wit to enjoy in the foreground: the Animal Containment officer is brilliantly characterised in a short scene involving him posing in front of a mirror, while a brief stint inside a prison manages to imbue every one of its animal inmates with a vivid personality despite none of them being on-screen for more than a few seconds. The stray dog of indeterminate breed whom the flock befriends is similarly given a big soul through small details in the animation and while not particularly essential to the plot, accidentally turns into the movie’s emotional centre through a sweet little story about kindness helping an outsider to find people to care for and be cared for.
Aardman’s expertise at visual characterisation is essential because where the likes of Wallace and the studio’s other movies have merely contented themselves with being primarily focused on visuals ahead of dialogue, Shaun contains no dialogue whatsoever outside the occasional grunt or well-timed baaa. For those who thought Wall-E‘s silent opening was impressive, Shaun takes it up to masterclass level, delivering all the information needed without a word spoken – though two very funny adverts on the side of a passing bus give Shaun an early nudge in the right direction – while often utilising silence as its own comedic tool, most perfectly a gag involving a hilariously unsettling dog watching an imprisoned Bitzen from the cell opposite. Even the credits are a delight, relayed via a reel of production sketches, and you’ll want to stay for one extra joke at the very end. Not because there’s anything much to it, but because knowingly missing out on a single Aardman joke feels like a crime in and of itself.
There’s so much to love about Shaun that the frustration of its pacing problems only feels greater in retrospect. At 45 minutes to an hour long, it could’ve been a masterpiece. At 85 minutes – the standard length for an Aardman movie – it just feels a little too patchy to recommend as voiceferously as I would, say, the unexpectedly wonderful Paddington. The visuals are beautiful, the laughs are plentiful and the characters as wonderfully constructed as personalities as they are physical plasticine creations, yet the lagging pace accentuates the weaker gags a little too much and scenes involving the Farmer feel like they’re lifted from a less witty, more dreary movie. It’s still completely charming and absolutely worth seeing if you’re a fan of any of the studio’s previous work or funny, visually bracing animation in general, but Aardman’s struggles at extending their storytelling to cinematic length means Shaun falls short of unqualified baaa-rilliance.