Shaun The Sheep owes a debt to his Aardman predecessors Morph and Gromit, claymation trailblazers who elicited laughs from their audiences with little more than a well-timed frown or sarcastic raising of the eyebrow. This in-house influence is pretty clear in Shaun’s feature length transition from small to big screen. Eighty-five minutes long and without a single word of reasonably comprehensible dialogue, it’s a ballsy creative avenue to tread and one that shows that Aardman understand when they’re onto a winner with a tried and tested gimmick.
Another well-worn contrivance for the elongation of your show’s running time into that of a full blown movie is to take your characters on holiday à la: Kevin and Perry, The Inbetweeners and the entire staff of Grace Brothers department store. Perhaps Shaun doesn’t get quite as far as the Costa Plonka, but the sentiment as the same. Shaun‘s efforts to engineer a day off from regular farm duties leads to the induced memory loss of their farmer and a trip to the archetypal “Big City” to rescue him, avoiding pest control as they go. In essence, it’s a well-worn British televisual-to-cinematic trope; stick your characters in an unfamiliar setting and let the fish (sheep) out of water (farm) comedy ensue.
Download Shaun the Sheep Movie Aardman has its home-spun, low-key, kitchen-sink charm down to an absolute tee and with the Shaun the Sheep The Movie they continue much of their previous good work. Shaun was the stand out character from 1995’s Wallace and Gromit short, A Close Shave and the endearing little fella has lost none of his sheep-y charm. If anything he’s gained a bit; he’s craftier now than he was in the nineties.
Perhaps Aardman’s optimism is also, in some respects, its weakness. One of the most satisfying elements of the Wallace and Gromit shorts was their ruthless sense of narrative economy. Essentially, you were treated to a mini movie in thirty-odd minutes. At 85 minutes in length, the Shaun the Sheep the movie drags it’s feet a little. An hour or so in and I felt like I’d had enough of a pretty good thing. This feels a little like a 45 minute Christmas Eve special, a little carelessly stretched out to fill a running-time more befitting a feature.
Shaun the Sheep Movie Download Shaun the Sheep is an Aardman Animation spin-off from their ever popular Wallace and Gromit franchise and was originally a series of short episodes made for children’s TV. However, just like Wallace who graduated to the big screen in Curse of the Wererabbit, Shaun has now made that same leap. And just like Wallace whose film was a natural extension of the short features, based on a simple premise that was extremely successful, so too Shaun has followed the same path. The Shaun the Sheep Movie is just that, a natural extension based on a simple premise that stays faithful to its origins and never tries to be anything other than entertaining. As a result the film is simply enchanting. The story is extremely simple, and could have come straight from the original TV series.
Shaun, fed up of his daily routine tricks the farmer into sleeping so he can have a day off. When the farmer ends up, by a series of mishaps, in the big city with no memory, it’s up to Shaun and his fellow sheep to rescue him and return safely to the farm. What could be simpler? Well, the introduction of Trumper the unscrupulous animal collector tries to stop them at every turn, certainly complicates matters. Thankfully Shaun’s ingenuity sees them through! For a film with no dialogue that relies entirely on simple noises and a terrific score, there is still a huge emotional involvement into the sheep’s plight. It is a testament to the skill of the writers and animators that this emotional investment drives the film along and makes it such a heart-warming success.
Download Shaun the Sheep Movie Two tracks to choose from English LPCM 2.0 (default) and DTS-HD MA 5.1 surround, I went with the surround. Just as the picture is fantastic, so is the sound; being made from the ground up everything matches the on screen action exactly and the surround field is stunning. Stereo effects come thick and fast, form the sheep moving across the screen to wide open areas of the city scape, buses, cars, motorcycles and crowd chatter providing just some of the effects. There is no dialogue to the film but the various noises that the characters make are quite natural sounding and are given plenty of directionality when called for. The score is very high in the mix and gets some very wide separation making full use of the surround speakers, which are in near constant use for ambient effects. Bass is very well integrated into the mix, and there are a few nice low frequency effects, but it never really goes subterranean, not that it needed to. On the whole a very satisfying track.
As a Blu-ray, the set from Studiocanal is pretty decent; the picture is stunning in its representation, bright colours, incredible detail and wonderful depth, while the sound is fantastic in its surround environment. Shame the extras are a little thin on the ground, though the Making of does start out well, if only they could have continued this! On the whole the film will win out over the disc’s short comings though, making it a terrific blind buy.