The other weekend my wife and I went to visit our son, his wife and family. At the exhortation of their five-year-old son, we all went to see a matinee showing of Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom. I am very glad we did. It is a hugely worthy successor to the other films in Ardman Animations’ Wallace and Gromit oeuvre, which include A Close Shave, in which the now-eponymous Shaun made his screen debut (if that is not too pompous a phrase when one is discussing an ovine-inspired piece of plasticine). A promotional poster for the film is shown on the home page.
The plot? Shaun and his pals are cultivating pumpkins with a view to celebrating Halloween. Due to a hilariously haphazard accident, a speciality in the W&G archives, the local farmer manages to get pulled through a fence and in the process destroy all the pumpkins, reducing them to a squelchy orange mess. The solution? Again resorting to a W&G staple, the sheep study a child’s science book which miraculously enables them to create enormous genetically modified pumpkins. Things take a turn for the worse…sorry, start to get increasingly entertaining when some of the magic potion finds its way into the farmer’s hair restorer. It is an overnight success.
Now equipped with a hairstyle he can be proud of, the farmer rides into town with the intention of impressing the local vet, to whom he has taken a shine. As he is about to make an advance with some clumsy move or other, he realises that his good head of hair has suddenly become horribly hirsute. Within seconds, it is growing uncontrollably. Temporarily seizing a small dog to hide his shame and his mane, he flees her surgery.
He therefore becomes The Beast, and much of the rest of the film is about how this plays out and how he can be returned to his proper incarnation. And, yes, this is a film for kids, but it is so much more than that, not least the way in which the creator, Nick Park, and the scriptwriters, Mark Burton and Giles Pilbrow, pay nifty homages to other films. The endings of Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Italian Job are referenced. The pitchfork-wielding villagers, in their pursuit of The Beast, resemble nothing more clearly than the villagers in The Wicker Man. At the end, when the farmer and the vet are preparing to head off to a party, one might think of Beauty and the Beast. Alternatively, or as well, one might be minded to think of Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta at the conclusion of Grease.
It’s not just the clever cultural references and downright smart jokes – for example, the hair-dressing salon that is called Barber Black Sheep – that catch the eye. (There are essentially no intelligible words; just appropriate noises.) In one fabulous ten-second sequence there is both a takedown of Amazon deliveries and a ridiculing of social-media influencers. At another point, while something wondrous is noisily occurring in the skies above him, a guy sits oblivious, glued to the screen on his phone. Which, briefly leads me on to the film I had originally intended to write about before my grandson sent me in a different direction.
The Social Reckoning is the second film about Facebook, 16 years after The Social Network. The reviewer in The Times opined that the first film seemed to ask ‘What could possibly go wrong?’ He added: “This film is the answer.” It is, of course, about Mark Zuckerberg, the high priest of social-media villainy. To find out more I would suggest you read Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. It is a brilliant book and very disturbing. In the meantime, stick to the sheep.