The film also invites descriptive words like understatement, subtlety, cleverness, and a word that Pixar coined, simplexity: simple in form but complex and richly-detailed in execution. In this age of giant tentpole, effects-driven family films, Aardman is still doing their own thing the same way they've been doing it for 20+ years.
Shaun the Sheep has starred in a series of his own countryside-set mini-shorts, but made his debut in the Wallace and Gromit classic A Close Shave. Like Gromit, he can express such a deftly-balanced multitude of qualities - confidence, irritation, cautiousness - with just two round eyeballs, no dialogue. Gromit never got to carry his own story, however. Here, Shaun carries an entire wordless feature, and the results are delightful.
Shaun and his sheep cohorts have grown bored of routine on the pasture, so one day they lull the Farmer (lovably clumsy) to sleep in his trailer and hold a house party behind his back. Several hijinks later, the trailer rolls into the city and the Farmer emerges with a concussion and amnesia. It is up to the flock and Bitzer the sheepdog to rescue their owner and rekindle their affection for him in the process.
The jokes are choice: writer/director duo Richard Starzak and Mark Burton are very attentive to factoring early gags into the plot later on (my favorite sight gag involves a pig restoring two vandalized pictures of the Farmer: it's keeps going without overstaying its welcome). It also wouldn't be an Aardman film without an ingenious, hand-crafted contraption: here it's a comical makeshift police-horse operated similarly to the bird-airplane in Chicken Run.
Some issues: the movie could have dispensed with the occasional rap/pop song and fart joke (does Aardman really need to do that anymore, now that Dreamworks is out of the picture?), and the villain - an exterminator hell-bent on capturing the flock - could have dropped out at the halfway point, instead of showing up for a protracted action climax. Aardman's features often include a big finish, and it's plain unnecessary: they get by so well on the strength of their small-scale charm!
These are fortunately minor issues that hardly get in the way of everything so exquisitely right here. Let's hope that the artists at Aardman, and their unique way with plasticine, continues to grace American cinemas.
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