BEFORE: The first "Shaun the Sheep" movie came out in 2015, but I didn't get around to watching it until 2019, that's how hard they are to link to. But 2019 ended up being my first "perfect year", so maybe there's a reason for everything. I had to wait for another Aardman movie, "Early Man" to come along, just to get some linking possibilities going.
And then, of course, a few days after I watched the first film, they announced there would be a sequel - and that one's just as hard to link to, I have to have Andy Nyman carry over from "Death at a Funeral" (2007) and then put another Andy Nyman film as the outro just to pull this off. But in a way that makes things a bit easier, because it's the only plan, there aren't a bunch of forks in the road, there's just the one road to travel on.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Shaun the Sheep Movie" (Movie #3,181)
THE PLOT: When an alien with amazing powers crash-lands near Mossy Bottom Farm, Shaun the Sheep goes on a mission to shepherd the intergalactic visitor home before a sinister organization can capture her.
AFTER: I know some people who were rooting for this film to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, somehow it qualified even though it was released in the U.K. in October 2019. Then it was supposed to be released in the U.S. in December 2019, but then it wasn't - I'm not sure what happened there, because that was pre-pandemic and theaters were still open. But for whatever reason, it premiered in the U.S. in February 2020 on Netflix, and I know that the Oscar rules for 2020 movies were very lenient about streaming, which was unusual. Right now I'm trying to figure out if that's going to continue, or if the Oscar rules are going to revert to what they were before, where films have to screen theatrically to qualify - it could be important to know for an animated short my employer is making now. (Yes, it's about the pandemic but we hope to get it completed and in festivals before there are 7,000 other short films about COVID-19...)
Anyway, this stop-motion film is about an entirely different disaster, an alien invasion - only it's just one alien, and she's a child and very cute. Lu-La looks a bit like a rabbit when her ears are up, and a little more like a dog when the ears are down. She's actually visited Earth by accident, she left her parents on her home planet and went for a joyride in their "zoom-zoom", only to find that it was pre-programmed to make the voyage to Earth. Now she's alone on a very strange world, and she's already caused some fuss by landing her flying saucer in the woods, when an old man and his dog were walking.
Meanwhile, the sheep on Farmer John's farm are very bored, and trying to pass the time by playing frisbee, going for a joyride of their own in the farmer's harvester, ordering pizzas and doing other mischievous things that the farm dog, Bitzer, forbids one-by-one with signs depicting each activity and a big circle with a line through it. Shaun finds Lu-La in the barn, and introduces her to the rest of the flock, and after Lu-La imitates them and they all get on the same page, somehow the sheep figure out who she is and that she wants to get home. Also meanwhile, Farmer John reads about UFO activity in the area and decides to turn his whole farm into a cheap rip-off theme park called "Farmageddon". Now, I'm all for puns and portmanteau words, but isn't it a bit of a leap from a UFO sighting to armageddon? One spotted UFO doesn't necessarily mean it's the end times. (Couldn't there have been a better name for the theme park, one more closely associated with something alien?)
The story's just a bit too much like the plot of "E.T.", though, just with farm animals helping the lost alien, instead of kids, and just taken a few more steps to an illogical conclusion. Also, as Lu-La "phones home", the signaling device she wants to use can only be used from a great height - so, NITPICK POINT, it can send a hyperspace signal to another planet, but for some reason it needs to be 12 stories closer to that planet? That doesn't make much sense, unless it also needed power, but an object's location wouldn't determine how much power it has. It sort of works like a cell phone that isn't getting a signal, but it doesn't need to receive a signal, it needs to SEND one, so this just didn't really make sense.
Also, the head agent in charge of looking for aliens, what's her motivation? At first it seems she's just determined to catch aliens in order to protect Earth, or perhaps just to prove their existence, but then her reason-for-being changes near the end, and it's just a little too close to what we saw in "Men in Black: International", if you ask me.
Still, I know how much work goes into a stop-motion film of this length, so it was probably a great effort, and probably once they started and then other films with similar plot points came out, they couldn't change, because reshoots are expensive. There were probably a zillion little joke references and Easter eggs, but I only caught a few of them - I'm going to go look for a list of them now.
Also starring the voices of Justin Fletcher, John Sparkes, Kate Harbour, Richard Webber, Simon Greenall, Emma Tate (all last heard in "Shaun the Sheep Movie"), Amalia Vitale, David Holt, Chris Morrell, Joe Sugg, Ron Halpern, Mohammad Nayem.
RATING: 6 out of 10 pizza crusts
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