In the palm of my hand, I am holding what may well be the world’s most high-maintenance A-lister. He takes an entire day to perform just two seconds of footage, needs 20 stand-ins per movie and declines to utter a single word throughout the entire production.
But then, this 18cm-tall headliner has become adored thanks in large part to his sheepish lack of speech. Shaun the Sheep already has two Oscar nominations under his belt, has grossed £153m at the box office and has become, in the words of Amy Pearson, director of brand marketing at Aardman Animations, “a huge global star”.
When he made his screen debut way back in 1995, Shaun was simply the vehicle for a throwaway pun in Wallace & Gromit: A Close Shave. Wallace gave him his name after he was shorn (geddit?) by the Lancashire inventor’s Knit-o-Matic machine. He was on screen, as Radio Times put it, “for less time than it takes to cook a lamb chop” – but his creator Nick Park must have seen something special in him, because the mischievous sheep was resurrected for his own series in 2007 (it is still going strong after 190 episodes). In 2014, Shaun was voted the most popular BBC children’s character of the past seven decades.
Two successful feature films later, he’s back for his third big-screen outing, Halloween-themed The Beast of Mossy Bottom. The stop-motion story involves romance and mayhem as the Farmer vanishes, a beast appears and Shaun turns to science in an attempt to restore normality to Mossy Bottom Farm.
I’m at Aardman’s studios on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Bristol to get a behind-the-scenes tour of how the company has alchemised homespun British eccentricity into Hollywood gold. In this warehouse, there are 47 units running concurrently – each a tiny curtained-off room typically hosting by a single animator.
Technology is utilised sparingly. Shaun’s coat is not actually woollen – it’s made of nylon. The pumpkins are designed on a computer and 3D-printed. And the dizzying schedule, once on a pinboard, is now laid out on two eight-feet-tall monitors.
But the rest is all as quirkily low-fi as you would hope. Shaun’s eyes are moved with a pin placed in a hole in his pupils. The prototype for the Vet – a new character – featured hair made from a silver pan scrubber because the “Aardfolk” liked the texture. Any pesky dust attracted to the modelling clay is cleaned using a wet wipe and some lighter fluid. Once they get too dirty, “we have to re-fleece the whole flock”, says Kate Anderson, head of puppets.
And all the action is shot on cameras that look like something you could get from Currys. “It very much is,” says director of photography Charles Copping. “It’s an off-the-shelf digital stills camera.” He goes on eBay to find second-hand Nikon lenses, to avoid anything with an auto-focus.
Copping is talking to me from a unit featuring the interior of the farm’s windmill, the site of Shaun’s mad-scientist experiments. He says the luminous beakers and test tubes demonstrate how “we’re pushing the Shaun aesthetic further than we’ve ever pushed it before in terms of saturated colours”. Raising the baa, you might say.
The dayglo lighting takes inspiration from movie classics of the 80s. “We’ve got a scene at the end of the film with the beast hanging off a sail of a windmill with a swirling purple storm that was very much inspired by Ghostbusters.” Other influences range from Back to the Future to Frankenstein.
The film also features an ocean, with Shaun taking to the high seas in a cargo ship. However, the team has characteristically shunned CGI in favour of harking back to Aardman’s early days. Which means water-like reflections created by a light shone on something that is not far from a kitchen roll tube covered in aluminium foil.
An “animation bible” dictates every detail, down to the arc of Shaun’s eyelids. He does not have the privilege of a brow, like the expressive Gromit, so all the crew have to animate him are eye movements and a solid mouth that is stuck on the side of his face (each member of the flock has about 10 different ready-made mouthpieces). “It’s actually really fascinating how much range of expression you can get from so little,” says animation director Jay Grace.
Each animator is matched to compatible sections of the script. “Some people are very good at the more subtle performance and emotion; some people love the action stuff,” Grace explains. “And so we try and cast on people’s strengths.”
Of his colleagues, Steve Cox (co-director with Matthew Walker) adds: “We treat them like actors because they are great actors, in their souls.”
Early on, the animators film themselves performing the scenes to experiment with different gestures, movements and reactions. People say that owners start to look like their dogs. Do animators end up resembling their sheep? “They really do,” says Grace. “It’s interesting when the crossover happens – when the characteristics of those animators start appearing in the puppets because you really can see it. It really does start to zing out.”
The characters are moved 12 times for every second of film, with each unit aiming to produce 10 seconds of film in a week (that is supersonic by stop-motion standards, and double the average rate of a Wallace & Gromit). The Farmer’s farmhouse is the same one that has been used since Shaun’s CBBC debut, says the nominatively determined Kitty Clay – who was also an art director on that first series. It can take three months to make and decorate a single building and everything happens on site – from the drawings to construction and set-dressing with miniature weeds.
After working with Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks, then returning to British TV, Wallace & Gromit creator Nick Park once expressed relief. “Because it’s primarily for the BBC, I’m not getting constant notes about how it’s going to work in middle America.”
Over lunch in the staff canteen, Mossy Bottom producer Richard Beek recalls Netflix querying a line in their most recent Wallace & Gromit feature, Vengeance Most Fowl. “Someone said, ‘Flipping eck, Nora’ in one version of the film, and they just didn’t know what that was, and there was reference to a bog chain, which is a toilet handle. Whereas with Shaun, we don’t have that concern. You know what they’re thinking and feeling without words.”
But because Shaun is a bigger property abroad than at home, Aardman very much does have to worry about what fans in Seoul or Tokyo will make of their creations. The “Mossy Bottom” in the title is failing to translate into many other territories. Germany is going with Spuk im Kürbisfeld (Haunting in the Pumpkin Field) and Lithuania with Baimės Pilnos Kelnės (The Pants of Fear).
It comes out as Aardman – the studio that brought you Morph, Creature Comforts and Chicken Run – celebrates its 50th birthday, having been born after founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton, aged 12, sat at the same desk at Woking Grammar School for Boys. In 2018, they handed ownership of the company over to their employees, and both were knighted earlier this year. There will be more festivities as Shaun celebrates 20 years as an independent character in 2027 – fortuitously, the Year of the Sheep.
To round off the day, I am given a masterclass in ruminant head manufacturing by model maker Will Harding. All it takes is 10 minutes, a few black and white blobs and a single plastic tool to create an international superstar.
Once the operation is shorn of the 3D-printed pumpkins and 8ft computer screens, it all comes back to what has enabled Aardman to capture our hearts for half a century: a human thumbprint in a piece of clay.
‘Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom’ is in cinemas on Friday
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