Review of Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015) by Filipeneto — 28 Nov 2018

This movie was something totally unexpected to me. When I first started watching, I thought a movie for kids would bore me dead. The absence of spoken dialogue was something I had not seen in a feature film for a long time, at least since the last time I watched a silent movie. But I didn't get annoyed, on the contrary. I thought it has its own beauty and it's funny, even though it's not the kind of movie I see every day.

We do not have a fixed plot. The story told is very light and gives space for the several jokes and humour moments that they wanted to create in the middle. In essence, the film tells how a flock of funny sheep tries to find their farmer, missing for days in the middle of the big city and suffering from amnesia. Of course, there is a villain, who is the city's animal control agent (we've seen something like that in other animal movies in town).

This is a stop-motion animated film... nothing more, nothing less than the most laborious and arduous technique for making animated films. Aardman still uses it regularly, probably being the latest animation studio to do so, and is adept at this technique, so it should not be surprising if I say that the whole film is technically impeccable. Even the soundtrack worked very well. As I already mentioned, I was very surprised at the decision not to use spoken dialogue. But it even made sense, because it puts human beings at the margins of history to give space to animals.

The film earned the Oscar nomination in its respective category ("Best Animated Film"), but never went beyond that. Despite this, and the film seems to have been quickly forgotten by the public, it did deserve it. It's not brilliant nor remarkable, it's perfectly forgettable due to the absence of an impact script... but it's a technical feat and it's funny.