“Shaun the Sheep” is an 85-minute odyssey about two of the most basic human (or ruminant) desires: the need to get away and the need to come back home. It is defiantly analog from the get-go-the opening sequence highlights not just barnyard animals but also photographs that come from film negatives and a portable cassette player that provides the soundtrack.
It’s clear that the time-consuming nature of claymation leads to a concision in shots. Through inventive cutting, directors Mark Burton and Richard Starzak put Shaun and his sheep brethren through their daily paces at great speed.
The sheep have purple-lidded eyes, sly sideways grins and burning desire for a day off from the farm (and their benevolent but dim master, the Farmer). So they break out, thanks to interspecies cooperation: bribing a nonplussed duck, letting the pigs be piggish and, of course, incapacitating the Farmer by making him count sheep. His snoring form is stuffed into a caravan wagon that conspires to rumble away, downhill, and get stuck far from the farm in the Big City.
After his crash landing, the Farmer suffers from memory loss and the sheep are forced on the run by that classic antagonist: the stray animal collector. Luckily, Shaun is a natural leader of livestock and has his mates well disguised in thrift shop finds, with the littlest one expertly disguised as a sheep-shaped backpack.
By happenstance, the befuddled Farmer takes up shearing again, this time with hair clippers at an exclusive salon (he wields his tools with a Travis Bickle-like aggressiveness). His Q-Tip-shaped haircuts, with clever inevitability, become a meme sensation. Not until a Proustian moment-with a pile of sheep dung substituted for the madeleine-does he come around to his old ways.
Everything in “Shaun the Sheep” is handmade-you can feel the fuzz of sheep wool, you can see the fingerprints in the clay across the Farmer’s face. It’s a pleasure to see a film where the goal is not for it to look perfect (or indistinguishable from reality) but to look real.
• • •
“Shaun the Sheep” is showing at the Sonoma 9 Cinemas. Rated PG. Running time 1:25. Visit www.cinemawest.com.
He wields his tools ?with a Travis Bickle-like ?aggressiveness.
UPDATED: Please read and follow our commenting policy: