Butler's Cinema Scene

The Farmer and his “workers”

“SHAUN THE SHEEP MOVIE”  My rating: A- 

85 minutes | MPAA rating: PG

Sorry, “Inside Out.” Move over, “Minions.”

Because the best animated feature of the year — perhaps the best in several years — has arrived in a flurry of flying wool and good-natured weirdness.

“Shaun the Sheep Movie” may not plumb intellectual or emotional depths, but it does something no animated feature has accomplished in ages.

It is non-stop hilarious.  Not a minute of this movie goes by without a big, gut convulsing laugh.

Like the series of shorts that inspired it, the film is dialogue-free.  It’s a sublime 85-minute pantomime, and the closest thing to silent film genius since the heyday of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin.

The Aardman Animation production (they’re the folks who gave us Wallace & Gromit) is a dazzling display of both animation brilliance (seamlessly melding traditional stop-action Claymation with computer-generated images) and  comic inventiveness.

Shaun is one of several ovine residents of a bucolic spread operated by The Farmer.  The faithful sheepdog Bitzer maintains a sometimes tense foreman/worker relationship with the herd.

But when The Farmer is swept up in a misadventure to the big city — having lost his memory in a freak accident — Shaun and Bitzer must join forces to rescue their beloved master (who, in his confused state, has gotten a job at a hair salon cutting wealthy heads in the same style he developed shearing sheep).

A herd of farm animals sneaking about the metropolis sends up red flags for an animal control officer, who becomes the film’s villain.

The animal control dude

That description may not sound like a formula for a great film.  But it can’t begin to express the comic sensibility established by writers/directors Mark Burton and Richard Starzak.

Much that goes on here is pure silliness (like the sheep pulling on clothing in order to pass for human, lurching about like extras from a zombie flick), but there’s an almost clockwork perfection to the way Burton and Starzak foreshadow, set up, and execute their gags and elaborately conceived slapstick showcases.

The timing is exquisite.

And while it has universal appeal, the film is irrepressibly British. There have been times over the last 20 year when Aardman films have seemed obsessed with the sorry state of English dentistry, and here the moviemakers have a heyday sending up various aspects of modern Brit culture.

Moreover, the characters are tremendously rich.  No dialogue? No problem. In “Shaun the Sheep Movie” there’s never a doubt about what these characters are thinking and feeling. It’s all over their faces and body language. Human actors should be so expressive.

After watching this film I was so freakin’ happy that I stuck around to watch the closing credits — JUST BECAUSE I DIDN’T WANT IT TO BE OVER. For this I was rewarded with a couple of last-minute jokes that made the wait well worthwhile.

| Robert W. Butler