BEFORE: This film has been on my watchlist for a very long time - I'll bet there are only 4 or 5 films that have been on it longer. Let's say 2 1/2 to 3 years for this one, but it feels much longer - whenever something is languishing down in the unlinkable section, that puts my mind to work on how to get there, someday, maybe, if possible. It's not my fault, there were no "name actors" in this one, and it turns out there's not even any dialogue!
But in the end, I finally got there by waiting for another film from the same animation company - Aardman - and the same director/producer, Nick Park. A director could easily tend to use the same voice actors again and again, and that's what happened here, Richard Webber (who also has directing and art department credits) carries over from "Early Man". Nick Park also provided voices in both films, he did the voice of Hognob the pig in "Early Man" and some unspecified characters here. Animators tend to use whoever is handy, a fact that has gotten me some acting roles.
But now, OF COURSE, as soon as I finally managed to get this one off my list, I see that there's a new "Shaun the Sheep" movie filming now, which is going to be released in late 2019 or early 2020. Of course. I guess if I didn't get to this one now, I could have gotten to it then.
THE PLOT: When Shaun decides to take the day off and have some fun, a mix-up with the Farmer, a trailer and a very steep hill leads them all to the Big City - and it's up to Shaun and the flock to return everyone safely to the green grass of home.
AFTER: I've never watched the Shaun the Sheep TV series, but it's not hard to see the progression from the "Wallace & Gromit" series of films. Shaun first appeared in the 1995 W & G film "A Close Shave", which won the Oscar for Best Animated Short, and that was back before Disney & Pixar figured out how to cheat and stack the deck so they win that award nearly every year. The Farmer and his dog Bitzer are clear stand-ins for Wallace & Gromit - Bitzer is just a yellow Gromit with much smaller eyes, and the Farmer is really just Wallace with glasses and some bits of red hair on both sides. It wouldn't make sense to have Wallace & Gromit running a farm, plus the voice actor (Peter Sallis) died in 2017, so I guess maybe at some point he couldn't do the voice any more.
In the end, this film had more in common with "Lucky Break" than I thought it would, because essentially it's a prison break movie, only the prison at the start is the farm and its daily routine. Shaun comes up with a plan to distract the guard (Bitzer) and incapacitate the warden (Farmer) so the sheep can do whatever they want for a day. Part of the plan involves getting all of the sheep to jump over a fence repeatedly, which naturally puts any person watching that in the mind of counting sheep, and thus they fall into a deep sleep. Sure, it's a gag, but if this were anything close to true than every shepherd in the world would be narcileptic, and that can't possibly be right.
But Shaun never imagined that his plan would put the Farmer in a runaway trailer headed for the Big City. And unstructured freedom on the farm sounds great, until it's feeding time. Turns out that the sheep needed the farmer and his routine for something after all. (Listen up, kids, it's lesson time.). So it's off to the city to track him down, even if he's got Movie Amnesia and doesn't recognize his own dog and sheep, and instead has stumbled into a high-fashion hair-styling job, thanks to his proficiency with the clippers. At this point the city has become a prison of another sort, and another complicated prison break plan is needed to get the farmer out of his new life and back to his old one.
Oh, and there's Trumper, an animal control officer who favors fancy technology like a big clamp to pick up animals, and later a giant taser. Since he catches Shaun at one point and puts him in a cell, I think I'm spot-on with noticing the prison break theme. That's three escape plans in one film, if you stop and think about it. There are gags here in the cells that directly reference films like "The Shawshank Redemption". And Trumper takes Polaroids of the animals he catches, and posts them on the bulletin board like mug shots.
The best bits are probably the gags in the fancy restaurant, where the 8 sheep have disguised themselves as 4 humans (think two sheep standing on top of each other, wearing clothing) and as they sit at a table, none of them know how to act like humans ordering dinner. A lot of great humor here, and someone really took the time to try to get inside the minds of animals, to imagine what an animal might do if it was trying to imitate human behavior. We're rooting for the sheep at this point, but watching them fail again and again was quite hilarious. Plus the experience of leaving home and looking for someone in a big city was so much more relatable than watching stupid cavemen play soccer.
Also starring the voices of Justin Fletcher, John Sparkes, Omid Djalili (last seen in "Notting Hill"), Kate Harbour, Tim Hands, Simon Greenall (also carrying over from "Early Man"), Emma Tate, Henry Burton, Dhimant Vyas, Sophie Laughton, Nia Medi James, Sean Connolly, Stanley Unwin, Andy Nyman, Jack Paulson.
RATING: 7 out of 10 double-decker buses
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