Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom, the third feature film built around Aardman Animations' woolly stop-motion star, has been awarded a full five out of five stars by film critic Brian Viner. Viner, reviewing the movie ahead of its release in cinemas on Friday, called it "a joy" and urged fans to flock to see it.
The new film sends Shaun and the rest of the Mossy Bottom flock on another chaotic adventure, this time built around an exuberant horror-film pastiche in which Shaun himself takes on the role of a mad scientist.
It is the third big-screen outing for the character following The Shaun the Sheep Movie in 2015, which parodied the psychological thriller genre through a farmer stricken with amnesia, and A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon in 2019, which turned its attention to extra-terrestrial science fiction.
A Halloween mix-up sparks chaos
The plot centres on Halloween. The Farmer has taken a shine to Mossingham's vet, and the feeling appears to be mutual, with each planning to invite the other to the town's forthcoming Halloween Hoedown. Instead of romance, disaster strikes when the vet visits Mossy Bottom Farm to inoculate the animals.
The Farmer becomes tangled in a washing line hung with underpants the vet has just pulled from a goat's stomach, and crashes through a pumpkin patch that Shaun and the other sheep have secretly been growing to carve into lanterns. The pumpkins are destroyed.
Determined to fix the disaster, Shaun goes into full Dr Frankenstein mode, brewing a rapid-growth serum to restore the crop from a single surviving pip. The Farmer, however, mistakes the serum for hair-restorer cream. His comb-over is briefly transformed into a Rod Stewart-style hairstyle, before his hair keeps growing until he becomes a shaggy orange yeti, rampaging through the area because he can no longer see.
The vet, consulting a Book of Mystical Creatures that also covers the Loch Ness Monster and, apparently, Wombles, concludes that a Bigfoot is on the loose. The townsfolk are duly terrified, and so is Shaun, until he works out what has happened and sets about putting it right himself.
Horror-movie references throughout
The film leans heavily into familiar horror tropes. Its co-writer, Mark Burton, who worked alongside Giles Pilbrow on the screenplay, previously worked on Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit in 2005, and Viner noted echoes of that film throughout.
Among the nods is a playful reference to the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film Psycho. The screeching string music that composer Bernard Herrmann wrote for that scene to evoke stabbing is repurposed here as the sound of a sheep flossing its teeth.
Comedy for children and adults alike
Viner said every frame of the film, as with all Aardman productions, is designed to appeal to children, adults or both. He singled out the sight of Bitzer, the Farmer's loyal sheepdog, trotting out of his kennel to solemnly dispose of his own poo bag, and a sudden, fleeting burst of the theme tune from long-running radio drama The Archers, which he said made him laugh out loud.
Viner said the film is further elevated by moments of unexpected seriousness. While stopping short of suggesting directors Steve Cox and Matthew Walker are making a political point, he noted they have fun turning the lynch mob, "that most ugly of spectacles," into an object of comedy.
A global export built on silence
Viner credited Aardman's decision to give Shaun no dialogue as a masterstroke, arguing it is one of the reasons the character has become one of Britain's biggest cultural exports, alongside Mr Bean. He pointed to a Shaun the Sheep theme park in Sweden and a life-sized recreation of Mossy Bottom Farm in Japan as evidence of the character's international reach.
Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom opens in cinemas on Friday.
