Aardman’s third Shaun the Sheep feature drops the flock into an old monster film and gets steady laughs out of it for 81 minutes. It is a long episode of the television programme, which is no bad thing, and it is not more than that.
This is the third time Shaun has been let out of the television programme and into a cinema, and the first time for his directors. Steve Cox and Matthew Walker make their feature debuts, working from a script by Giles Pilbrow and Mark Burton. The idea is simple and good: put the flock inside a monster film. It is 81 minutes long, it carries a U certificate, and it made us laugh more often than most comedies that use words. It is also a long episode, and we would not tell anyone who has never warmed to Shaun that this will change their mind.
Nobody speaks. Nobody ever has: the Farmer (John Sparkes) grumbles in syllables that are not quite English, Bitzer barks and sighs, and the sheep get everything across with their eyebrows. A horror spoof suits this. The old Universal pictures, Frankenstein and The Wolf Man above all, were half silent anyway: a shadow on a wall, a hand on a doorknob, a face at a window. Cox and Walker borrow those pictures and let the audience supply the scream.
Charles Copping lights the farm at night the way those films were lit, with hard, angled shadows, mist held low over the field and a single torch beam wobbling across the yard. It is handsome work, and it is also a joke, because the thing casting the shadow is usually a sheep standing on another sheep. Natalie Holt’s score uses shivering strings and an organ for the beast, builds each entrance as if it were the real thing, and cuts the music dead the moment the joke lands. Her timing is as good as the animators’.
The gags come fast and most of them land. There are signs in the village with terrible puns on them, which we still read to the end every time. The best material is the smallest. Bitzer’s ears drop a beat after the rest of him has understood bad news, and that beat is funnier than anything in the film with a chase in it. Timmy (Justin Fletcher) is exactly where he has been told not to be, and Timmy’s Mum (Kate Harbour) wears a look of coming doom we recognised from our own kitchen. We laughed out loud four or five times, and each time it was a face rather than an event that did it.
What does not work is the shape. The plot exists to carry the gags, and by the middle it has settled into a loop: the beast is seen, the humans panic, the flock covers it up, repeat. The third pass is less funny than the first. The humans beyond the farm are single jokes with famous voices attached. Dani Dyer grunts as an influencer, Roman Kemp grunts as a pizza boy, Paul Whitehouse grunts as a shopkeeper, and the casting is the joke. The pace sags for a stretch before the finale, which we will not describe, and which is loud, inventive and longer than it needs to be.
The obvious comparison is Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which put a monster in an English village and gave it a vegetable competition, a romance and a rival. This has the vegetables, a small love story on the side, and less else. Shaun wants the beast dealt with and the Farmer none the wiser, which is enough for 81 minutes and would not have been for a hundred. Most critics have been warmer than we are; we agree about the craft and notice the ceiling.
Take a child if you have one and go anyway if you do not. It is short, it is kind, it frightens nobody for longer than a second, and it makes a good case for turning the lights off early and pretending it is already October.
