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A Cute Claymation Seasonal Adventure with Shaun the Sheep

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 -or both. Regardless, the landscape for children’s Halloween media is very different than it used to be, though Shaun the Sheep never got the message. This is a movie that feels of a kind with The Nightmare Before Christmas, or perhaps more accurately those old Halloween specials like It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. A touch spooky, but spirited and wholesome.
Shaun and his fellow sheep on their farm near the town of Mossy Bottom in the north of England are excitedly growing pumpkins for the Halloween season. However the whole patch is accidentally destroyed by their clumsy Farmer, awkwardly smitten with a Vet he wants to take to a local Halloween-themed country dance. Looking to revive the pumpkin patch, Shaun finds a science book and promptly becomes a mad scientist in concocting a formula that will rapidly regrow the pumpkins. However some of it gets into the Farmer’s hair growth formula -his baldness being the chief source of his insecurity. The result is that the pumpkins grow to exponential size and the Farmer’s hair, neat enough at first, grows wildly out of control until it envelopes his whole body -causing havoc in the town and forcing Shaun and his friends to find some way to save their master.
As is customary with Shaun the Sheep, none of the characters speak tangibly outside of muttered syllables and all but Shaun and the sheepdog Bitzer are nameless (and Bitzer’s name isn’t even dropped in this film). Everything is communicated by visuals, and it is a testament to Aardman's skills and process that it all feels rather seamless. Shaun's mouth occasionally juts out of the side of his face but for the most part it is left to his eyes and body language to convey a feeling -the precision is remarkable, you get a good sense of his smart but prone to compulsive personality. And of course the entire film is an exceptional showcase of painstaking handmade craft, with some of the effects especially impressive in this consideration -the hair all over the Farmer for example, all of the pumpkins and their splatter.
The premise here allows for a degree of excess strangeness, with a lot of fun put into the silly mad scientist persona and consequent experiments and inventions that Shaun concocts. The Bigfoot-style monster that the Farmer turns into and the unwitting havoc he causes in this form, leading to classic mob vs. monster and beauty and the beast tropes is also imbued with a very playful spirit. It is by no means spooky, but it does take joy in the scary contours of its storytelling, especially as the Beast returns to the farm to the terror of the sheep and Bitzer misinterprets several clues to his identity as his having captured or eaten the Farmer -illustrated through cute imagination scenarios (Shaun has some too) sometimes rendered in brief 2D animated vignettes.
There is such a wholesome air to the movie and a good -sometimes unexpectedly sharp- sense of humour. It's a lot of visual gags of course, but the Aardman animators have become their own little experts at that. Charming bits like Bitzer adjusting the mirrors of the Farmer's car before fleeing the beast or the precocious youngest sheep's enthusiasm for carving a pumpkin with a chainsaw stand out. And of course there is much silliness with the townspeople and dock workers and naturally between the Farmer and the Vet themselves who are fairly endearing as a central coupling goes. They both appear to be middle-aged which is a cute and distinct dynamic for an animation romance.
If anything holds the movie back it is perhaps a certain lack of originality in the storytelling. The film has some creative set-pieces, including on the boat that the beast is eventually loaded onto in a crate, and the climax fully leans into the Halloween iconography to its benefit. But the premise of a rural northerner with a (seemingly) unrequited crush turning into a monster who needs to be contained and rescued by his intelligent pet -all against an autumnal backdrop- is very close to that of Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. The movie does enough that is starkly different that it doesn’t feel like a complete re-tread -and the Farmer and Shaun are sufficiently distinct from their counterparts, but the contours of the premise do feel a little too familiar for this studio, almost to the point of an attempt to recapture a past glory -that Wallace & Gromit film representing of course a high watermark for Aardman, winning the Oscar for Best Animated Film.
That is a long-distant possibility for Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom, which is a very slight movie though fairly enjoyable. It is not bombastic or flashy, but it is very cute and funny for its simplistic storytelling. And of course it is mightily impressive to behold the craft on display, the intricacy of every shot and movement. It has all the charm of a relaxing Halloween special, which is more than enough in its own way. A homemade seasonal delight of weird science and madcap monstrosities.

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