Shaun the Sheep Movie
(2015)
I haven’t followed the success of Wallace and Gromit spin-off Shaun
the Sheep throughout its four TV seasons, so I bring little prior knowledge
to his big screen debut aside from Shaun himself, and that’s from his
appearance in A Close Shave. Which
evidently isn’t necessary; the movie is 99% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes (for what that’s worth) and StudioCanal has
already commissioned a sequel. Yeah, Shaun
the Sheep Movie is good fun; slight, amiable, but anyone expecting the
level of inventiveness and delirious pace of Curse of the Were-Rabbit will be a touch disappointed.
I guess I just expect Aardman to be consistently forward
pushing, rather than relying on a cash cow (albeit, Shaun’s the lowest grossing of their big screen efforts, helped by
being the cheapest). But that’s the way of things (just look at Pixar and their
redundant sequels). It’s three years since The
Pirates! In an Adventure with the Scientists! which I really liked (Shaun’s budget is less than half that
feature’s, and it shows). Their next effort, due in another three years, is
titled Early Man, which is hopeful if
only because if the title is indicative it’s a very difficult sub-genre to spin
into a successful movie.
The plot is wafer-thin; looking to take the day off, Shaun
and his fellow flockers send the farmer sleepy-byes by getting him to
inadvertently count them. Unfortunately, the caravan they deposit him in ends
up running away. With an amnesiac farmer in the city, taking up a career as a
hairdresser/shearer, it’s up to Shaun, his sheepish clan and faithful hound Blitzer
to retrieve him. Which involves fending off the attentions of a vindictive
animal catcher.
Kudos for making what is, effectively, a big screen silent
animated movie (the characters speak in grunts; that said, Justin Fletcher,
John Sparkes and Omid Djalili deliver great grunting performances), except that
might lead one to expect bigger and more elaborate set pieces to complement the
conceit (a la Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd). Shaun is mostly content to amble through its 85 minutes, such that
it feels its length.
There’s also an unwelcome pop sensibility present, no
doubt misguidedly designed to broaden the picture’s appeal but only succeeding
in making it feel slightly generic. Ash’s Tim Wheeler provides the title song,
and there’s a rap from Rizzle Kicks over the end credits. I did really like the intrusion of Primal
Scream’s Rocks, however, to scenes of pigs in their underpants making a mess of
the farmer’s house.
That’s the thing about Shaun
the Sheep though; it’s the incidental pleasures that score rather than the
attempt to furnish it with a plot (I have to admit, I missed most of the cited
movie references in there). There’s a liberal does of belch, bum, fart and poo
jokes (they’re funny, but I’m sure it wasn’t such common currency when I was a
nipper); the animal catcher (A.Trumper) even ends up with his head up a
(pantomime) horse’s arse.
An extended gag takes the drag tradition a step
further (most recently celebrated in the superior Paddington); instead of men dressing up as women, sheep dress up as
women (I guess that isn’t strictly drag), and the animal catcher is duly
smitten with a couple of sheep dressed as a woman. Which is sort-of brilliant,
but never quite as brilliant as it
might be.
It’s partly down to everything else in the picture being
more interesting than the sheep, even the sheep when they’re pretending not to
be sheep. A sequence in a restaurant has a patron with a fish on his head
putting his hands in a lobster tank, and it evidently tickled the animators far
more than endless sheepishness. Likewise, a visit to the pound finds a staring
dog psyching out anyone (Bitzer) who makes the mistake of looking its way, and
features an iguana blowing raspberries.
Best of all is Bitzer in scrubs, stumbling into an operating
theatre, gagging in his mask when he sees the description of the surgery he’s
due to perform, and being handed a scalpel rather than the hacksaw he’s just
grabbed; it’s a shame he’s distracted by a skeleton hanging in the corner, as
it might have been fun to have him go through with the procedure.
The slightly baffled, bespectacled Farmer reminded me
slightly of Tom Hardy’s Ronnie Kray (perhaps he studied Aardman for his
performance?) I’m not sure I care for Shaun all that much, to be honest. I may
have been mistaken, but he seems to make “Heyyyy!”
noises like Fonzie’s dog in that dreadful Fonz
and the Happy Days Gang cartoon, which is bound to put you right off.
Bitzer is far preferable, even if he’s slightly sub-Gromit.
Shaun the Sheep Movie’s
likeable, then, but in the Aardman pantheon it’s closer to their making a Cars sequel than a Toy Story. I was going to suggest Aardman might need Nick Park
directly credited as director to reach their heights, like John Lasseter with
Pixar. Then I remembered Lasseter is directly responsible for Cars. There is a nagging sense that
Aardman has been coasting on Wallace and
Gromit and its spin-offs for the best part of two decades, still hoping to
happen upon something as captivating and (re-)defining.