Will Becher makes stop-motion characters funny through movement and timing. His feature debut with Richard Phelan is a gentle, carefully made family adventure, though its small jokes are more inventive than its science-fiction story.
Fi1m perspective
In A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon (2019), the farmyard business is the strongest material, even with an alien adventure on offer. We laughed at the incidental jokes because the puppets get on with them without stopping to explain. Becher and co-director Richard Phelan trust movement and timing to carry the humour. It makes a good family evening, although the story offers little surprise.
That attention to performance has a practical background. Becher was an animator on Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), then lead character animator on Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015). As animation director on Nick Park’s Early Man (2018), he was already overseeing how characters moved before sharing feature directing duties on Farmageddon. Phelan brought a story background to that partnership, Becher his experience on the animation floor. The film is best discussed as joint work; we cannot sensibly assign each successful joke to one of them.
The scale of Farmageddon does give them room to try things. Its underground base and alien spaceship sets allow for detailed environments without losing the handmade look of Aardman’s stop-motion work. We like that willingness to build something bigger while keeping the puppets’ physical comedy central. The difficulty is that the science-fiction story is less inventive than the small jokes happening inside it. The songs sometimes intrude, too, when watching the characters is already quite enough.
Becher later served as supervising animator and second unit director on Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024), continuing to work directly with character performance. One shared feature gives us limited grounds for separating his taste from that of his collaborators. His command of wordless comedy is the clearer reason to follow his work. Start with Farmageddon when the evening calls for something funny and gentle, rather than something unfamiliar.
Biography
Will Becher is a British stop-motion animator and film director at Aardman Animations. He began his career with a summer work placement on Chicken Run in the late 1990s while studying animation in Edinburgh. On graduation he joined the animation team on Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), one of the studio’s youngest feature-film animators at the time.
Becher has worked as a lead character animator on The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists (2012) and Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015), and as animation director on Early Man (2018). He co-directed A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon (2019) with Richard Phelan; the film received Academy Award and BAFTA nominations for Best Animated Feature. In 2024 he was appointed Stop-Motion Lead at the Aardman Academy and has served as supervising animator on Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024).
