Animation feature film “Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom”, the latest work from Aardman Animations, feels a bit too familiar and predictable on the whole. Sure, it is still a fun and charming animation film, the film somehow does not surprise or amuse me that much, and that is a bit of disappointment for me.
As clearly shown from its opening scene, the film is your typical Halloween story. As Halloween is coming, Shaun the Sheep and his fellow sheep pay more attention to their little secret pumpkin patch hidden from their bumbling farmer and his dog Bitzer, but, alas, there comes a little unfortunate accident which ruins the whole pumpkin patch of theirs. While becoming quite disappointed just like his friends, Shaun comes across an old science book later, and that leads to your average mad scientist moment. Inspired by a certain chapter of that old science book, Shuan busily works on the production of a very special potion, and he does succeed in the middle of one dark night.
Anyway, that potion produced by him works wonderfully for the pumpkin patch, but, not so surprisingly, there comes another problem. A bottle containing that potion in question is accidentally handed to the farmer, who mistakes it for a hair-growth serum to take care of his balding head. Not long after he applies the potion to his head, a very disastrous transformation is started upon him, and you will not be surprised by what occurs next, if you remember what happened in Oscar-winning Aardman animation film “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” (2005).
Once they see what unfortunately happened to the farmer, Shaun, Bitzer, and other sheep try to take care of the problem, but, of course, this only leads to more troubles and some funny moments for us to enjoy. While you will have some laughs when they are terrorized inside the farmer’s house when the transformed farmer frantically tries to get into the house, you will be amused by when Shaun later tries to capture the transformed farmer via a trap based on a rather complex mechanism. In addition, there is also an effective action sequence which may take you back to the climax part of “A Close Shave” (1995), an Oscar-winning Aardman animation short film which incidentally showed Shaun the Sheep for the first time.
Meanwhile, the farmer soon finds himself hunted by frightened village people just like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. Although a local female veterinarian later tries to save him, but, alas, she does not recognize him at all because of his transformed appearance, and there is an amusing scene where she mistakes him for a Bigfoot to be sent back to his natural habitat located somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Needless to say, this leads to more action and adventure for Shaun and his friends, and we have some more fun as they bounce from one point to another as trying to rescue the farmer. When Shaun needs some extra time for his little rescue operation at one point later in the story, his friends promptly do a rather ingenious musical act for distracting humans around them, and this will surely bring you more smile.
However, the film still feels like more or less than an extended version of a short film because the story is a bit too thin to justify its 80-minute running time. While a possible romantic subplot between the farmer and that female veterinarian feels quite perfunctory to say the least, the main narrative is often too predictable in its expected plot turns, and so we only find ourselves merely following it without getting much surprise.
At least, you can still admire the considerable efforts put into the stop-motion animation in the film. While they surely used some CGI here and there, they did build and then use real figures and objects for their stop-motion animation, and this brings a lot of style and charm to the film. In addition, Shaun and his fellow sheep are still fun to watch as they go through a series of humorous actions along the story, and they are certainly quite lovable as usual.
And I also appreciate how the film sticks to its silent movie style just like its predecessors. While they are all voiced by a bunch of voice performers, all the characters in the film make only sounds while not speaking at all, but you will not have any problem in understanding the story and characters. In fact, I am sure that a 3-year-old niece of mine will instinctively enjoy the film without much difficulty.
Overall, “Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom”, directed by Steven Cox and Matthew Walker, is one or two steps compared to “Shaun the Sheep Movie” (2015) or “A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon” (2019), but I must emphasize that a lesser Aardman animation movie is still much better than most of those bland and forgettable digital animation films out there. Although it does not have the unadulterated comic inspiration of “Chicken Run” (2000) and several other better animation films from Aardman Animations, but it is fairly engaging despite its several weak aspects, and I can only hope that Aardman Animations will really entertain us more with whatever it is planning to do next.
