Judging by the giggles of the kids I took, Shaun and his pals provide a delightful, if undemanding, treat. Setting out from Mossy Bottom Farm to the Big City, the flock search for their farmer, who loses his memory only to gain accidental fame as a trendsetting hairdresser. There’s little plot, only a cursory villain (an over-zealous animal control officer), and no dialogue, in what amounts to a silent movie, only brimming with nonsense noises, innocuous songs and stop-motion sheep.
Kids are well catered for, but if you’re after the adult humour sprinkled liberally throughout the far superior Wallace & Gromit escapades, there’s little here, aside from a throwaway feline Hannibal Lecter gag, and a quick post-credits Shawshank Redemption nod. For a hero, Shaun has precious little to do, and even less by way of distinctive character traits. Still, on the big screen the Aardman modelmakers’ miniature environments brim with lovingly rendered detail. The visual hijinks that make Wallace & Gromit such rewatchable fare are replaced with fart gags and sheep impersonating people, (by standing on one another, dressed in clothes), not just once, but for almost a third of the film.
I could bleat on about what might have been, but, shear away an imaginative adventure, and you’re left with fluffy fun but lazy fare that, like the film’s repeated gag of sheep jumping a fence, is in danger of sending grown ups to sheep… er, sleep.
