Apart from the animals walking on their hind legs and everything being made of Plasticine, the world of Shaun the Sheep Movie looks startlingly familiar.
In their last two films, Arthur Christmas and The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!, Aardman Animations whisked us to the North Pole, the South Seas and through every last cranny and turret of Victorian London, but here, the endlessly cherishable studio comes down to earth with a joyfully silly bump.
Aardman’s latest picture — perhaps the studio’s purest, and most purely charming since The Wrong Trousers in 1993 — takes place in an instantly recognisable present-day Britain, with the fingerprints and scuff marks intact. It’s a land of market squares and charity shops, bus stations and cafe lattes, beards, internet memes and songs by M People. A place where a farmer can stumble into a hairdressing salon wearing thick glasses, a grass-stained T-shirt and hospital-issue pyjama bottoms and be mistaken for a hipster style icon. A place where the punchline “baa-baa-shop quartet” doesn’t even have to be spelled out: once you’ve shown four sheep singing close-harmony a cappella, the audience can be trusted to work it out for themselves. In short: it’s home. Chances are, you’ll also recognise the star.
Shaun’s first screen appearance came in 1995’s A Close Shave, when Wallace and Gromit, the studio’s de facto mascots, rescued him and his flock from being turned into dog food. Since then, the sidekick has eclipsed his saviours: the broadcasting rights to the Shaun the Sheep television series that followed have been sold to 170 countries, while his woolly merchandise gambols off toy shop shelves everywhere from Japan to Qatar.
This feature-length version has been certified Universal by the BBFC, and seldom has that judgment seemed so on the money. There can’t be a child in the world who won’t adore this. As in the series, there’s no spoken dialogue, with the voice cast providing nothing more than mutters, bleats, and the occasional woof. And the plot — Shaun and his flock scour The Big City for their suddenly amnesiac farmer — is the kind of thing that could have been comfortably covered in a short. But like the classic silent features from which the film proudly and openly takes its cue, Shaun isn’t a piece of long-form storytelling, but a runaway steam-train of moments, each one self-contained but coupled to the rest, and barrelling forwards on collective crackpot momentum.
Mark Burton and Richard Starzak, who co-wrote and directed, understand there’s more to silent comedy than not having their characters talk. There’s an effectively perfect scene in a haute cuisine restaurant, in which the sheep try to pass themselves off as human diners of some taste and discernment, that uses looks and gestures — some dazzlingly subtle, others howlingly not so — to tickle the same neglected folds of your brain and gut as similar bits performed by Chaplin, Keaton, and Laurel and Hardy. This is the kind of stuff that has been, and will be, funny forever — built on eternal human fears and foibles that, whatever your age, make complete sense. When we’re in polite company, none of us wants to be rumbled as a sheep in a dress.
A mountingly surreal sequence in which Bitzer, the no-nonsense farm sheepdog, finds himself in a hospital and is mistaken for a surgeon, matches it for teetering, Jenga-tower daftness, and if the film never quite scales the heights of these two episodes again, it makes repeated, honest goes of it. What makes all this silliness seem to matter isn’t plot, but weight.
Aardman’s characters, lovingly moulded from modelling clay and wool, exist in a place that hand-drawn and CGI animated creations don’t, right on the balancing point between sight and touch. The visible fingerprints on their faces and limbs just make you want to add more of your own. If The Pirates! was blockbuster Aardman, this feels looser, scrappier, more home-made, though it probably took hours of painstaking labour to make it look that way. The wonder of stop-motion is the mountain of effort required to achieve even the smallest movement. The charm of Shaun the Sheep is that you don’t notice it for a moment.