SPOILER ALERT: This story contains major spoilers for “Shaun The Sheep: The Beast Of Mossy Bottom,” now in theaters.
Shaun the Sheep is back for his third feature-length film, “Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom.” This time around, Shaun and his fellow sheep are getting ready for Halloween — except, the pumpkin patch has a problem. When Shaun attempts to fix it, things go awry as he creates a growth formula that transforms the farmer into a terrorizing, hairy beast.
The film contains very little dialogue, but it brims with visual gags and nods that Aardman’s stop-motion animators cleverly crammed in: “Psycho,” “Star Wars” and even “The Shining” (a pub is called The Shine Inn). However, the biggest influences behind the storytelling came from classic Universal monsters and the Hammer Film Productions horrors.
Speaking with Variety, the film’s directors Steve Cox and Matthew Walker, explained that the initial idea was for it to be a Valentine’s Day special. “It was always the idea of the farmer having a relationship with someone, but then at some point, the idea of a monster came up,” says Walker. “And the ideas got combined at some point. Then the natural progression of that was it being a Halloween special.”
As the ideas evolved, the story of Shaun being a mad scientist emerged as an early concept the team loved. Aardman’s stop-motion studio is no stranger to doing monster movies, having previously produced “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.” If they were going to tackle another monster movie, they wanted it to look completely different.
Cox explains the monster needed to have a very distinctive silhouette. To achieve this, they spent time carefully designing the character. Cox says, “We knew that it was going to be created from hair, because it’s obviously the farmer. Spoiler alert! With all the hair growing out from his sides, his beard and going up into these bushy tufts at the top. We love the fact that he’s got this great, distinctive, almost-horns, as he’s coming over the hill.”
Given the farmer has ginger hair, that allowed them to visually integrate him into the orange world of pumpkins and blood-red sunsets. Fox says, “That allowed us to up the level of saturation in this film.”
The inspirations of “Wolfman” and “Frankenstein” are obvious to any fan of Universal monsters. “We took our visual language from the films that Matt and I grew up with in the ‘80s,” Cox says as he also cites “Ghostbusters,” “Indiana Jones” and “The Goonies” as references. He adds, “But our story started in the kind of Universal monsters and Hammer horror [world].”
Cox admits that leaning into horror gags proved to be a challenge, given the franchise’s family-friendly nature. “We had to bring things in do our own take on them and make it family-friendly because we didn’t want to alienate an audience.”
Among the tropes of the genre were spooky woods, shadows, creaky branches and misty docks — all elements that could create jump scares, but of a friendly nature. One scene features the flock of sheep in the house being chased, with the question of where would they hide? They end up in the bathroom, which leads to a “Psycho” gag.
Walker explains all of those references and ideas come from the story and the characters. “It always happened very organically.”
Aardman continues to use stop-motion technology to tell the stories of its beloved characters, and while Walker says many aspects of the studio’s pipeline have stayed the same, some technology has evolved. “We’re using digital still cameras now rather than film.” And while the use of digital effects in films has increased, Walker says, “We always try and do as much as we can in camera.”
As for their knack for telling stories without dialogue, it still proves to be challenging, particularly when telling an emotional story. The film’s subplot is a love story between the farmer and the vet, except the growth potion complicates the farmer’s attraction. Similarly, the sheep have solid heads, which limits facial expressions. Walker explains that with the sheep, any expression has to come through their body language and eyebrows and eye movements and mouths. The farmer is even more difficult because he doesn’t even have eyeballs — he’s just glasses and a mouth. But we have such brilliant animators that whatever’s in the storyboards, they’ll be able to find a way to convey those emotions.”