Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom brings you Frankenstein’s flock (Mark Kermode film review).
Video review: https://youtu.be/MitdWn1t0eM
The good Doctor Kermode got there first, and got there rather well, so watch his movie review before you read any further. He calls it pure unalloyed joy, notes the sincerity of the horror homage, and makes the excellent point that the film is good enough to give childless adults an excuse to buy a ticket without feeling like they’re loitering. Also flagged: the score by Natalie Holt does a great deal of the heavy lifting, the Farmer’s grunt-based performance is somehow one of the year’s better bits of acting, and the whole thing thrums with what the anthropologists call collective effervescence and the rest of us call a cinema full of people laughing at the same time. All correct. Go and see it.
Now our version, which agrees with most of that but is constitutionally incapable of being that nice about anything for a full paragraph.
Aardman have quietly been the most reliable genre studio in Britain for thirty years, and nobody says so because the genre in question is plasticine. Were-Rabbit was a straight Universal monster movie with cheese in it. Farmageddon was Close Encounters with a bloke in a hi-vis vest. Now we get The Beast of Mossy Bottom, which is Frankenstein crossed with a Bigfoot flap crossed with a village fete, and which is far more interested in horror’s furniture than in actually frightening a five-year-old. The pumpkin patch gets flattened by the Farmer, Shaun responds by becoming a mad scientist (the mad scientist laugh is the only sound he makes in ninety-one minutes, and it’s worth the admission on its own) and a regenerative potion gets mixed up with a bottle of hair restorer. The Farmer sprouts. The village forms a mob. Pitchforks are raised.
Which is the joke, and it’s a sharper one than the U certificate lets on. Every British monster picture from Hammer onward has known that the monster is the least frightening thing in the woods. The truly alarming element is always the torch-carrying locals who’ve decided, on no evidence, that somebody needs burning. Mossy Bottom understands this perfectly and plays it for slapstick, and if you want to read the mob sequence as a comment on the modern habit of forming a howling consensus before anyone’s checked the facts, nobody at Aardman is going to stop you. They’re too well-mannered to wink about it, which is precisely why it lands.
The craft remains faintly obscene. You can see thumbprints. You can see that somebody spent a fortnight of their life moving a sheep’s eyebrow four millimetres at a time, and that the same person then had to convey an entire emotional beat using nothing but the Farmer’s spectacles. The sheep still talk out of the sides of their mouths, which should not be funny and is. Holt’s score romps, in the technical sense: it gallops when the film gallops and goes all Hammer-strings the moment anything gets shadowy. And the BBFC advice sheet is a small work of art in itself, warning parents of very mild threat, rude humour and, this is the good bit, implied bad language. Implied. A sheep says something, and you know exactly what it was, and it wasn’t spelled out. That’s a whole comic tradition in two words.
This is the third of these, and it’s the first one where the pacing occasionally lets you notice you’re watching a film. The silent-comedy form is unforgiving: Keaton, Tati and Chuck Jones all knew that a gag which doesn’t land has nowhere to hide, no dialogue to paper over it, no snarky sidekick to cover the join. Cox and Walker are first-time feature directors and there’s a stretch in the middle where the repetition stops building and just repeats. It’s also, for a film with Beast in the title, notably unbothered about being weird. A slightly stranger, darker, more Mossingham-at-midnight version of this exists in a parallel universe and we’d quite like to see it. That version probably wouldn’t have got a U. We are, we accept, now the one outlet in Britain prepared to disagree with Mark Kermode about an Aardman film, which is roughly the reputational equivalent of kicking a labrador.
None of which stops it being the most purely enjoyable ninety minutes in a British cinema this autumn. It’s in UK and US cinemas from today, it’s ninety-one minutes, it’s certificate U, it’s directed by Steve Cox and Matthew Walker from a script by Mark Burton and Giles Pilbrow, and it will be the only Halloween film this year where the scariest thing on screen is a man in a cardigan with a torch. Take a child if you happen to have one lying about. Don’t let it stop you if you haven’t.
