9 / 10
Official trailer
Shaun the Sheep Movie is the rare modern feature animation that contains no spoken dialogue. Mark Burton and Richard Starzak co-directed. The film is built from the Aardman television series, which itself was a spin-off from the Wallace and Gromit short A Close Shave. The story follows Shaun and the flock as they accidentally cause the Farmer to lose his memory and end up in the Big City, then have to travel there to bring him home. The film runs eighty-five minutes. The audience never hears a word of English.
Shaun made me laugh harder than most comedies with a full script, and it did it with a flock of clay sheep and a farmer who only ever mumbles. My one small complaint is that the opening takes its time getting the flock to the city. Once they arrive, I didn’t want it to end.
The sheep communicate through baas and the humans through mumbles, and the audience still understands everything that happens. The film made approximately one hundred and six million dollars worldwide on a twenty-five million dollar budget. It was nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar. It lost to Inside Out, which was probably the right call, but Shaun the Sheep was the more difficult achievement.
The Silent Comedy
The directors built the film as silent comedy in the tradition of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin.
Every joke is visual. Every emotional beat is conveyed through performance. The sheep’s reactions to events around them are the source of most of the humor. The audience reads facial expressions and body language for ninety minutes without ever needing translation.
The technique is harder than it looks. The directors and animators had to build every scene to be intelligible without language. The film delivers the exposition through visual setup. It conveys the plot turns through action and reaction. It scores the emotional climaxes instead of speaking them. Contemporary animation has few more disciplined exercises in visual storytelling. I think this film honors Keaton and Chaplin better than almost anything made in the last few decades. Every gag has to be readable from the picture alone, and I can’t find one that misses.
For Writers
A story that refuses one of its standard tools forces the writer to use other tools more rigorously. Shaun the Sheep has no dialogue. The constraint forces every other element to work harder. The animation, the staging, the music, the editing all have to do more work than they’d in a film that could fall back on dialogue. The lesson is that voluntary constraints often produce better work by forcing the writer to develop weaker craft elements that dialogue would have papered over.
The Big City Sequence
The middle section of the film is the flock finding its way through the Big City, which the film portrays as a chaotic place full of opportunities for sheep to be mistaken for humans, dogs, and other things. The sequence in which the sheep eat at a fancy restaurant by standing on each other’s shoulders inside a single coat is the film’s most-quoted moment. The bit works because the directors set up the visual logic carefully and then push it as far as it’ll go.
The restaurant scene is the kind of sustained physical comedy that animation can do better than live action.
The sheep have to coordinate. They have to interact with humans who mustn’t realize what they are, and communicate among themselves without alerting the staff. The sequence runs several minutes and never breaks its internal rules.
The restaurant scene is my favorite thing in the movie. A stack of sheep in a single coat trying to get through a fancy dinner without being caught had me in tears from laughing, and the directors keep adding one more problem just when I thought the bit was done.
For Writers
A sustained comic sequence works when the writer establishes the rules of the joke and then follows them consistently. The restaurant scene in Shaun the Sheep has clear rules. The sheep mustn’t be detected. The audience knows the rules. The comedy comes from watching the rules be tested. The lesson is that comedy benefits from clarity of constraints. The audience can only laugh at near-disasters if they know what counts as a disaster.
The Heart
The plot is structured around the Farmer losing his memory. The sheep have to bring him home because they want to go home and because they care about him. The film doesn’t announce this. It shows it through small details. The Farmer’s photograph on the dresser. The flock’s anxiety when he doesn’t return. Shaun’s specific guilt about being responsible for what happened. The emotional architecture is solid even though the film never speaks a word of dialogue.
The reunion at the end is paid off without sentimentality. The Farmer recognizes his sheep.
The sheep recognize their Farmer. The work of getting there’s been done. The audience doesn’t need a speech. The dog Bitzer’s relief at being reunited with the flock and his master is the kind of small character beat that makes the larger narrative work.
The reunion got to me more than I expected a film about sheep to manage. Bitzer’s relief is the moment that does it, and I think the film is smart enough to get out of the way and let the animation handle it.
For Writers
Emotional climaxes don’t need to be spoken to be felt. Shaun the Sheep’s reunion ending works without dialogue because the entire film has been preparing the audience to feel it. The lesson is that words are sometimes the weakest tool for emotional payoff. If you’ve done the structural work, the audience will supply the meaning. A wordless climax can be more powerful than the speech that would have explained it.
Craft Note
Mark Burton and Richard Starzak co-directed. Burton and Starzak wrote. Aardman Animations produced. Justin Fletcher voiced Shaun and several other characters in non-verbal vocalizations. Released February 2015. Approximately twenty-five million dollar budget. One hundred and six million worldwide gross. Nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 2016 Academy Awards.
Is Shaun the Sheep Movie as good as people say?
9/10. I think this is the best silent comedy in feature animation since the classical era, and Aardman proves again that it doesn’t need a line of dialogue to sell a joke or a feeling. The Big City sequences are as good as sustained physical comedy in animation gets, and the reunion deserves its emotion. The farm scenes up front are the only stretch that drags, and that’s what keeps it from a 10. Watch it with anyone of any age.
