A sheep sets up a laboratory inside a windmill. That single idea drives this entire film, and it turns out to be plenty.
Aardman Animations hits its 50th anniversary this year, and most of the discussion naturally drifts toward Wallace & Gromit. That’s fair enough. Yet the studio’s understated most valuable player has long been the sheep who ambled into 1995’s Academy Award-winning short A Close Shave and simply stuck around. Shaun and his Mossy Bottom flock have gone on to anchor several series, a pile of shorts, and three feature films. Number three, Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom, arrives in theaters September 18, assembled from equal parts Universal Monsters devotion and silent-era sight comedy.
That pumpkin patch never stood a chance
As with 2015’s Shaun the Sheep Movie and 2019’s A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon, the scope here stays deliberately small and easy to read. The Halloween tale begins at the farm overseen by the oblivious Farmer and his considerably sharper sheepdog with the pronounced overbite, Bitzer (comedian John Sparkes voices them both). Out in the pasture, Shaun (Justin Fletcher) heads up a flock that has accurately sized up the Farmer as a walking hazard, concealing a secret pumpkin patch from both his gaze and his graceless boots while tending it to perfection for their Halloween Hoedown.
He wrecks it anyway. Of course he does.
Crushed, Shaun turns up a hand-lettered science book in the barn and commits to full mini-Frankenstein mode, windmill laboratory and all, brewing a serum for the pumpkin seeds so that little Timmy and the rest of the flock don’t lose their party. The seeds do come back. Without any brakes. Which leaves Shaun scrambling on the back hoof to repair his own repair job.
The Farmer’s hairline gets a storyline of its own
Threaded through all of that: the Farmer is carrying a torch for the local Vet (Nina Sosanya) and feels sheepish about his receding hairline. He digs out an old bottle of hair growth formula, which has just been topped up with the leftovers of Shaun’s serum, and reckons it will supply the nerve he needs to ask the lady doc out. You can imagine how hairy the situation becomes.
The reason Mark Burton and Giles Pilbrow’s screenplay lands, and the reason most Shaun and Aardman features land, is that the mounting catastrophes never feel manufactured by plot mechanics. They emerge from characters taking actions that collide with other actions. Dominoes. Kids can track it without effort, while adults pick up the classic-cinema framework holding it together.
The frames are also crammed. Horror easter eggs, visual gags piled atop visual gags, performances carrying weight that dialogue would ordinarily shoulder. There’s barely any dialogue at all, and first-time feature directors Steve Cox and Matthew Walker manage it by holding the spine steady and layering in jokes that nod to contemporary horror right beside riffs on James Whale’s Frankenstein and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.
Every strand on that Sasquatch was positioned by hand
The directors venture beyond the farm gate too, into the eerie woods of Mossingham, granting the windmill genuine set-piece heft, broadening the population of Mossingham and mounting a whole sequence out at sea. That expanded scale stops the modest farm from feeling too confined for a big-screen story, and it pushes the limits of what the Aardman crew can achieve in stop-motion.
Think about what the animators signed up for: vast quantities of hair in motion as the Farmer transforms into a Sasquatch, along with spraying water and sea creatures. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that every character and every setting is built by hand and shifted by hand, one frame at a time. That’s the patience and craft this studio keeps demonstrating it possesses.
Natalie Holt’s score warrants its own mention. In what is essentially a silent picture, she and her orchestra shoulder the emotional weight, punctuating jokes with flourishes in the Carl Stalling mold of the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies scores, then constructing entire moods in the spaces between grunts and gibberish.
Its place in the trilogy
The Beast of Mossy Bottom is a solid entry in the farm trilogy and in Aardman’s wider catalogue. It was plainly assembled by silent-era horror obsessives collaborating with some of the fastest pun-slingers around, and the studio’s devotion to stop-motion while paying respect to horror’s lineage counts for something.
It doesn’t have the polish or the elevation of Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. It may not even be the finest of the three. But the straightforward story gives children a firm handhold while the horror literacy running beneath it pays off for parents and animation buffs, and there are plenty of laughs and animation achievements to warrant the trip out. It hasn’t reached streaming yet, so the theater is your only route regardless.
Come for the windmill lab. Stick around for the hair.