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It’s a good year for sheep at the movies, which makes it a good year for pretty much anyone at the movies: Months after “The Sheep Detectives” proved one of the surprise delights of the spring, Aardman’s reliably lovable
Shaun the Sheep returns to ensure we haven’t forgotten who’s the ovine OG. The third feature-length outing for the “Wallace & Gromit” alum, “Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom” arrives seven years after “A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon” — meaning, essentially, that the new film’s primary target market wasn’t even born last time out. Not that they’ll have any trouble coming in late; with its wordless slapstick once again designed for maximum accessibility, this ebulliently daft autumnal escapade is as good a place to start as any. Few animated franchises have maintained quite this level of cheery consistency.
For us elders, it doesn’t feel like much time has passed at all: It’s business and chaos as usual at Mossy Bottom Farm, where the nights are drawing in, harvest season is upon us and our rebellious title character (voiced, which isn’t exactly the term for any of these nonverbal characters, by Justin Fletcher) turns mad scientist for a Halloween-time escapade, with results as wholesomely, giddily farcical as ever. The seasonal aspect is a canny one: There remains a relative shortage of quality spooky-season viewing for very small tots, and it’s easy to imagine “The Beast of Mossy Bottom” — fully on theme, but emphatically more silly than scary — becoming an October go-to for years to come.
It’s an indication of just how much the American commercial model of Halloween has infiltrated the U.K. over the last couple of decades that this most innocently English of cultural properties is here awash with jack o’lanterns and trick-or-treat paraphernalia. It’s days before October 31st in this sleepy corner of the countryside and while its human inhabitants are gearing up for the annual “Halloween Hoedown” (again, not a combination of words any Englishman would have encountered until fairly recently), the frequently errant flock of Mossy Bottom has been proudly tending to their own secret pumpkin patch. (If you’re wondering how sheep can grow pumpkins, you’re not in the correct spirit of things.)
Anyway, when said patch is entirely decimated by an elaborately staged chain of pratfalls involving the sheep’s owner Farmer John (John Sparkes), a recalcitrant goat and an expandable laundry line — like its predecessors, the new film will always find the most inspired, complicated way to build a scene, or cause one — plucky Shaun resolves to find a quick chemical solution. Armed with confidence, a book titled “Homemade Science” (the “home” and the second ‘e’ are soon obscured) and inexplicable access to laboratory equipment, he develops a rapid-growth formula that turns pumpkin seeds into prize-standard gourds overnight; when Farmer John happens across some and slaps it on his balding pate, it has a similarly lush effect on his locks. The flaw in the formula, we soon find out, is that the pumpkins won’t stop growing. Neither will the hapless farmer’s mane, soon rendering him a yeti-like village pariah. Hairy hijinks ensue.
This is all nonsense, of course, bounding toward a steadily more dizzy climax as it barely fills an 80-minute runtime, padding out its trifle of a plot with a whisper of romance between Farmer John and a new arrival, a nameless but redoubtable vet voiced by Nina Sosanya, plus the faithful grunt work of guard dog Bitzer (Sparkes, again).
But the “Shaun the Sheep” films have never been about the big picture, instead functioning on a joke-to-joke basis with an inordinately high hit rate. While the tone may often feel blithely throwaway, the filmmaking is never careless. With feature first-timers Steve Cox and Matthew Walker (both vets of Shaun’s small-screen outings) at the helm, the practical execution of the Aardman cinematic universe still amazes: Each falling-domino setpiece is a marvel of handmade detailing and methodical choreography, geed up by the delightfully frantic orchestrations of Natalie Holt’s score.
As usual, the comedy is successfully pitched to all ages, with kids sure to revel in the generally antic energy of proceedings, while their parents can pick up passing references to “Psycho” and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video, among other horror touchstones, along with stray satirical jabs at parking regulations and, in a more timely touch, a wave of far-right bigotry and protest in the U.K. (In that sense, “Mossy Bottom” picks up where “Farmageddon” left off in its Brexit-era messaging about acceptance, though it would be a mistake to overstate just how much is on the film’s mind.) Everyone, meanwhile, can enjoy the simple, perfect sight gag of a voluptuous sheep cleaning a blackboard with her ample fleece. No one in live-action cinema, frankly, is doing visual comedy quite this well, each time out; to mix all manner of barnyard metaphors, when it comes to cartoon horseplay, Shaun the Sheep still wools the roost.
