American studio animation has felt quite safe as of late -DreamWorks movies especially. Consistent and reliable brands are maintained or else original movies that follow very tried and true formulas. It’s not always a bad thing -some really strong and meaningful storytelling came out of the Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon sequels. And The Wild Robot did some pretty stellar things within its standard narrative. But there’s not typically the same kinds of ambition or thematic innovation to these movies as you might find in animated works from other countries -and that is true even if the animated work is about another country. Pinpointing a culture and compressing it into a movie is another popular trend of mainstream animation lately -the trope that resulted in Moana , Coco , Raya and the Last Dragon and Encanto among others. Good movies (most of them), but always just a little distant and inauthentic. You can feel the narrative, tonal, and thematic strictures upon them...
I was very surprised to find that the new Shaun the Sheep movie was getting a theatrical release this side of the Atlantic. The last one, Farmageddon , didn’t get much play out here and Shaun the Sheep is far from ubiquitous as a brand. But there were a few children in my audience who laughed at the right moments and seemed genuinely engaged with the cute claymation farm animals. And that’s good, because it’s an endearing, intriguing art that only Aardman Animation seems to be doing anymore. And Shaun the Sheep , which is still producing new episodes, is the main thing keeping the lights on at that company. The Beast of Mossy Bottom is certainly a daring choice of title for a movie that otherwise taps into a Halloween theme fairly well. There’s been a shortage in the last decade or so of Halloween movies for kids, perhaps due to a lack of an audience in a young generation more desensitized and attuned to adult horror or an absence of imagination or impetus from the movie industry -...