Shaun the Sheep makes mates with a stop-motion alien in Farmageddon

Enlarge /. This ad is not actually in Farmaggedon, but it sums up the mood of the film.

Do you like stop motion animation? I love stop motion animation. I can't remember a time when I didn't love stop motion. From King Kong to the California Raisins – put the good stuff straight into my veins.

The current champion of Stop-Motion is Aardman Animations, who mainly works in a modeling clay called Plasticine, which is equally modern and charming handmade. I came across an Aardman short film called The Wrong Trousers (1993) in high school on PBS and I was thrilled. The film follows a pathologically British inventor named Wallace and his long-suffering dog Gromit. In Trousers and her other adventures, Wallace shows a profound lack of proportionality: he builds Rube Goldberg's inventions if a butter knife did, he buys robotic pants to paint his walls, and he builds a rocket to get to the moon, if he does, the cheese will run out. He also lives in a universe where everyone has more teeth than could possibly fit in his mouth.

• Man the way God intended.

• Gromit is a dog.

• This is a picture of Creature Comforts, a short film that came out 30 years before the film I was supposed to be writing about. The hardest thing about reviewing a movie is not comparing it to any other movie I've ever seen.

• When someone asks, "What's the best thing about Chicken Run?" The only correct answer is: "The chickens have teeth."

• Wallace's love interest in Curse of the Were Rabbit: still be my beating heart.

• The who-rabbit in the curse of the who-rabbit.

• A real replica of Curse of the Were-Rabbit's anti-pesto van.

• The pirate captain seeks comfort from his beloved parrot in The Pirates! Band of Misfits (UK title: The Pirates! In an adventure with scientists!)

• Behind the scenes at The Pirates! Gang of outsiders

• Actor Eddie Redmayne addresses this little guy in Early Man.

• These two are BFFs in Early Man.

• So these are two, which is unusual.

I love Aardman's stuff for two big reasons: I love the look and the worldview. An Aardman production combines almost miraculous stop-motion performances with characters who mostly have a calm "Durrr" face. Aardman's clay tears sparkle like real water, but since walking is physically impossible for stop motion figures, they just run incredibly fast instead. I think it's great that the chickens in Chicken Run (2000) use their "hands" to stuff food into their mouths, although it might have been easier to show them pecking like real birds. The animators did everything to be inaccurate. In the Aardman universe, "charming" trumps "realistic". (In addition, Aardman made the music video for Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" in 1986.)

Aardman's view of the world is essentially a large English village, where most conflict comes from absent-minded eccentrics whose eccentricities get in each other's way. There are only a few villains and they only exert the influence they exert because the rest of us are too polite or shy to oppose them. While Aardman short films focus on just a few characters, his features tend to play whole villages with cross-eyed but well-intentioned dingbats. If it's not a village, it's a chicken coop or a pirate ship or a group of hunters and gatherers. The filmmakers have unlimited affection for their motifs with the googly eyes, forgive them their mistakes and celebrate their idiosyncrasies. To quote Mozart: "Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius."

Compare this outlook to SouthPark, for example, which makes fun of the stupidity of people who dare to make the world a better place. Aardman says that we are all stupid from time to time, so be patient and kind. We do our best with the neuroses we have.

Dude, shouldn't you have been talking about Farmageddon?

And so we come to A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon, which is essentially an airy remake of E.T. This time, the alien doesn't befriend a lost alien who befriends a human boy, but a mischievous sheep named Shaun.

Otherwise the setup is pure Aardman: a village, a farm and various eccentrics. The villager who first discovers the alien spaceship risks death to save his fries that are still cooling. A delivery man loses his pizza because he is chasing a frog off the street so that he is not run over. and a farmer’s reaction to First Contact is that it’s a way to get a new wheat thresher. (This doesn't look like gross materialism, but like a man who lives to thresh wheat. Sitting around in his underwear.)

• We met Shaun in 1995 in A Close Shave.

• Shaun has been doing that ever since.

• Shaun always smashes the eggs of this shepherd. That could only be a metaphor; Farmaggedon is unclear.

  Aardman animations

• They live with the farmer.

  Aardman animations

• Look at his wonderfully stupid face.

  Aardman animations

• An alien stole Homeboy's fries.

  Aardman animations

• And it steals the farmer's pizza.

  Aardman animations

• Shaun finds the alien hidden in the barn.

  Aardman animations

• These deaf-headed skulls are funnier than they should be.

  Aardman animations

• They are led by Agent Red, who has problems himself.

  Aardman animations

• Everyone learns a lesson at the end.

We met Shaun in the 1995 short film A Close Shave when Wallace and Gromit saved him from a robotic dog named Preston who had malicious plans with knitwear. Since then Shaun has had his own franchise company consisting of 7-minute short films and now his second feature film. At the beginning of Farmageddon, he spends his days on the farm inciting nonsense with his fellow sheep and generally being a nuisance to the irritated sheepdog of the farmer. But when Shaun finds a scary alien hiding place in the barn, he decides to grow up and help his new friend escape the army of fools in Hazmat suits that have invaded his village. (The amount of humor Farmageddon milks out of Hazmat suits is incomparable.)

Also – and that's cool – because our protagonist is an animal, nobody speaks in Farmageddon. The animals don't talk because they are animals, but when people talk we mostly only hear very British grunts and noises. So there are no clever buddies, no comedians ruffling each other in recording booths, and pop culture references are mainly limited to gentle gags in the background.

A couple of nits

Aardman's second class is still a great time in the cinema, but despite his charm, Farmageddon is Aardman's second class. My wife summed it up this way: although every Aardman film we've seen so far has been child-friendly, it was the first one she thought was a children's film.

Children may love the look of Aardman's Creature Comforts (1991), which synchronizes interviews with real British people about stop-motion animals, but they are unlikely to understand the life of silent despair that these interviews involve. Hugh Grant's protagonist in The Pirates! Band of Misfits (2012) is essentially in the middle of a career crisis, and I wonder if an unmarried person can really grasp the relationship between the farm couple in Chicken Run.

Even though Gromit may be remarkably intelligent, he's still essentially a dog, and when we first met Shaun in the 90s, he was still a sheep. But in Farmageddon, he has become a replacement child (or, as my wife says, "season 1 Bart Simpson"). I still like Shaun, but I liked him better than sheep. And, as is often the case in children's films, jokes and topics can sometimes linger longer than necessary so that the audience, who hasn't watched films for 30,000 hours, still annoys them.

<img alt = "A scene from 2015 Shaun the sheep movie which I have not seen yet Excuse me. "Src =" https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Aardman_ShaunTheSheep2015-640×348.jpg "width =" 640 "height =" 348 "srcset =" https: // cdn .arstechnica .net / wp-content / uploads / 2020/02 / Aardman_ShaunTheSheep2015.jpg 2x”/>Enlarge /. A scene from the 2015 Shaun the Sheep film that I haven't seen yet. Excuse me.

(As befits a children's film, Farmageddon also dispenses with Aardman's blased stance on accidental death: think of the football game before the title in Early Man (2018), in which no one cares if Herp Derping players are in burning pits falling or knocked down by boulders.)

This is more of an idiot than a point of criticism, and the relationship between Shaun and the German Shepherd – which is essentially that of a wild child and a bossy but well-intentioned older brother – is relatable.

Another disadvantage is that Aardman is gradually adding more and more digital effects to his stop motion films. This is good for backgrounds and certain special effects, but the characters and shots in Farmageddon are a bit too polished, especially compared to Aardman's earlier, more reddish work. This diminishes the charm of Stop-Motion somewhat: "Human hands did it," a good Stop-Motion seems to say, "not a huge company with locations in Los Angeles and Seoul." As much as I like Pixar films like Up and Inside Out, their too perfect pictures are always a hump to get over and I don't want Aardman to do the same.

Although Farmageddon played in European cinemas, he made his US debut on Netflix last Friday. It was the same day that Sonic the Hedgehog opened in thousands of theaters across the country. Why? Because life is unfair, that's why. Now we console ourselves with some Wensleydale on crackers. I hear it tastes like the moon.