Aardman Animations’ stop-motion process is labor-intensive and rigid, requiring comprehensive forethought and specificity of execution, so what’s perhaps most striking about their films is their freedom and playfulness. Their latest, “A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon” (streaming on Netflix beginning Feb. 14) required months of backbreaking frame-by-frame animation, but it has a freewheeling, improvisational spirit, a looseness that results in a giddy comic energy.
Shaun’s first big-screen vehicle, the 2015 “Shaun the Sheep Movie,” was an inspired comic contraption, sending the good-hearted sheep and his flock on a big city adventure. In “Farmageddon,” the adventure comes to them, via an alien child who crashes near their farm, the conclusion of an accidental joy ride to earth. While Shaun attempts to help the alien “Lu-La” get home, Farmer John sees a moneymaking opportunity, and attempts to court the U.F.O. tourist trade by turning his farm into a comically rinky-dink theme park.
If the setup sounds reminiscent of “E.T.,” that’s purposeful; the directors Will Becher and Richard Phelan include numerous visual references to Spielberg’s classic. They also throw in winks in the directions of alien pop culture artifacts like “The X-Files,” “Doctor Who,” “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” which should please sci-fi fans of all ages.
But the most telling homage is a reference to Chaplin’s “Modern Times,” a reminder of Aardman’s true tradition. The “Shaun” films are entirely free of dialogue — the animals don’t talk, while the humans are only heard speaking gibberish — and in many ways, these shorts and features are carrying the baton of classic silent comedy.
Shaun is a resourceful “little fellow” in the tradition of Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, and his adventures are similarly well-constructed machines of gags, foils, everyday foibles, and comic exaggerations. As with those silent classics, the “Shaun” films boil down to their set pieces, and while none in the new film approach the Tati-esque perfection of the restaurant scene in “Shaun the Sheep Movie,” “Farmageddon” features plenty of inspired, boomeranging slapstick, executed with clockwork precision. It’s a very funny movie — and an endlessly, refreshingly cheerful one, which is just as rare.
A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon
Rated G. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
