‘Shaun the Sheep The Movie’ Review
In my recent interview with The Boxtrolls directors, Anthony Stacchi commented that, unlike other forms of animation, stop-frame seems to exist under the dark shadow of Tim Burton. If that’s true then Aardman seem to have successfully escaped this evil, cartoon-gothic reign via some ridiculous, cheese-powered contraption brandishing British-made weapons of silliness and daftitude. The latest of these rockets of ridiculousness is Shaun the Sheep The Movie.
The film expands on the TV series Shaun the Sheep, one of the CBBC programmes that amuses both young and old and could just as easily air on prime time. The show is a dialogue-free worldwide hit relying, like Mr Bean, on clever, well-crafted visual comedy and therefore has great international appeal. The first act act of the feature gets things off to a suitably silly start with all the charm of the TV show but even better gags. Directed by Richard ‘Golly’ Starzak (Rex the Runt, Robbie the Reindeer) and Mark Burton (writer on Madagascar, Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and many classic TV comedies), the film gets back to the Aardman roots of modern Britain except sillier.
Animal Farm seems to be referenced in some amusing early sequences whereby the pigs take over the farmer’s house, except this time instead of being an analogy of the corruption of ideals and betrayal of the proletariat in the aftermath of totalitarian revolution, it’s about funny pigs watching TV and eating pizza.
This follows a lovely and strangely moving backstory intro which features Shaun as a lamb and the farmer as a happy-go-lucky, punkish youth with a full head of spiky hair, which struck a chord with myself and other dads, no doubt. It caused me to wonder sadly why the farmer ended up living on his own and also helped reinforce the bond which exists between the animals and the farmer causing them to undertake their mission later in the film. Although this possibly overstates the sentimentality of the piece and makes it sound like one of those ‘dog walks from Kansas to New York to find his owner’ type Disney live action stories; It definitely isn’t, as this early pathos is soon forgotten in a bombardment of daft antics. This lack of a strong emotional arc could be said to be a weakness of Aardman films but that would be kind of missing the point, especially with this film, in which everything is motivated by what’s funny. In this sense Aardman could be said to be more in the pure comedy tradition of non stop silliness going back through Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, Warner Brothers/MGM cartoons, Norman Wisdom, Its a Mad Mad World, Monty Python and Carry On films rather than the more emotional ‘dramedy’ approach of Pixar and Disney features.
The obvious problem with this is that, while it works brilliantly with shorter television installments, a feature film can feel a bit lacking in momentum and the second act does feel a rather stretched at times. This is often the case in an animated feature, and in this instance of a TV spin off of a spin off (considering Shaun’s origin in A Close Shave) the audience is mainly carried through with a dense saturation of background jokes, silly shop signs and gormless animal exploits. The farm gang’s quest to a strange urban world has the familiar country-bumpkin-in-the-big-city comedy value, except here with the very Aardman-like twist that they are animals trying to fit in to a human world. A similar feel at times to Babe – Pig in the City perhaps but unlike that super stylised exotic metropolis, here the city seems based on the scuzzy realism of Bristol, with its multicultural variety and motorways cutting through the town centre; More Ken Loach than Ken Anderson.
Perhaps due to the grey concrete location, the city looked a bit lower budget than the farm sequences and the population seemed more like the kind of almost generic humans that feature in Aardman’s early, more grown-up Channel 4 Conversation Pieces rather than the more stylised Wallace and Gromit era characters. The baddie, a stray dog/sheep catcher (another familiar trope), has more the feel of a sadistic job centre manager from Croydon, but I guess they are going more for the banality of evil here and aiming at the type of joy-sucking government bureaucrats that are the real contemporary figures of fear and hate. To be fair, the rotten rat catcher does become increasingly frenzied and cartoon like in his attempts to capture Lady and The Tramp – sorry, I mean Shaun and his new stray dog pal.
Third act returns to the farm, returns to form and builds to the now traditional Aardman spectacular set piece cliff (spoiler alert) hanger (spoiler alert) climax upon false ending upon spectacular culmination until banal baddie meets his suitably smelly comeuppance and stray dog meets his suitably straggly companion.
Not quite ‘shear’ brilliance then but overall a great outing for the kids (my 7 year old daughter loved it) with plenty of laughs for Mum and Dad. The film doesn’t entirely raise the ‘baa’ animation-wise and therefore may not entirely satisfy jaded stop-motion fans spoiled by Coralines, nightmares before Christmases and curses of were-rabbits. Animation aficionados should keep this in perspective though and remember that this is more of a mid budget TV spinoff, the first Aardman feature made without the help of a big US studio and it comes across as being made with more love, attention, detail and gag count than the straight-to-DVD efforts of Disney and Dreamworks spinoffs. This is probably because Aardman haven’t ‘farmed’ (see what I did there?) their animation out to other territories as big US studios are increasingly prone to do, not only with their B features but, increasingly it seems, their major releases too.
Quite impressed with myself that I got to the last paragraph before the terrible sheep puns, which I felt under a certain amount of pressure to deliver – although Aardman may not approve of such joke-dodging antics.
Shaun the Sheep The Movie is released in the UK February 6th. For more information as well as international release dates you can visit the film’s official site.