The Shaun the Sheep TV show once started as a spinoff of Wallace and Gromit. Because of their short episode length (about 7 minutes) and humor the show became very popular. Aardman Studios, who’s responsible for producing the show took the next logical step and give the popular character his own movie. Did they succeed in taking something which works in short bursts and turning it into a feature-length movie?
The answer to this is a careful yes. The show itself is very compact and therefore needs to be effective every second of its running time, making sure that the viewer stays with it. Every episode really is a short sketch which takes one situations and executes it to its extremes. It’s a way of working that wouldn’t work when you had to do that for a longer period of time and the studio spent two years writing the story and another year animating and filming it.
The end result is a story in which the sheep are tired of their daily grind and decide to make the farmer fall asleep, allowing them to do whatever they want. Of course something goes wrong with this plan and they end up in the big city, not being able to find the farmer. They don’t know he has suffered memory loss and hasn’t got a clue who he is. The question is if the sheep will be able to find him and get everything back to the way it was.
That change of environment allows the studio to think of new jokes, which are really funny. The sheep dress up as people not to be caught by animal control. The end result is one of the funniest scenes, in which the sheep try not to stand out in a restaurant. Bitzer the dog also is regularly a source of jokes when he visits a hospital
Aardman Studios is one of the few studios who still is doing stop motion animation. It’s a very labor intensive process and the imperfections of it give the movie a certain charm. Visually it might not be as impressive as the things we see Laika Studios produce (for example with Coraline and The Boxtrolls), but in the end it is always about the humour and the story. Although the end result is something which isn’t as sharp as the average episode it does end up being a fun family film. What stands out is that during the whole movie not a single word is spoken, which means this is probably the only silent 2015 movie.
I didn’t know this is a spinoff of Wallace and Gromit. I’ve only watched clips of that series, but these sheep look like a hoot so I might give this a rent.
The show is funny and the little sheep in the show has its own show as well. The movie is a lot of fun.
Always liked these kind of movies 🙂