Who knew 2026 would involve so many family movies about flocks of British sheep solving crimes? If this is a trend I hope it lasts forever because The Sheep Detectives was adorable and Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom is even more so. A stop-motion animated film with no real spoken language full of movie jokes, dad jokes, and farm jokes is a treat that frankly we all deserve. Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom is just another funny sweetheart of a film from Aardman, the studio which gave us Wallace and Gromit and continues to delight us.
It’s nearly Halloween and Shaun the sheep (voiced by Justin Fletcher) lives on Mossy Bottom Farm with the Farmer and Bitzer the dog (both voiced by John Sparkes) as well as his family. The sheep are secretly growing vegetables for a local competition. Meanwhile the Farmer is both sad about being bald and trying to work up the courage to invite the Vet (voiced by Nina Sosanya) to the Halloween Hoedown. He has the hat, he has the boots and he has the moves; what could possibly go wrong? Well, there’s an accident and all the vegetables are destroyed, but fortunately Shaun is prepared to go full mad-scientist to enable replacements to be rapidly grown. Thanks to his mad-scientist skills and the flock’s eager assistance, he makes some goo, which works so well on the pumpkins and other vegetables he stores the extra in an old hair tonic bottle. Then suddenly the farm and the nearby town are menaced by a very scary, very hairy beast!
The rest of the plot might be able to be guessed but it should not be spoiled, because the flow of physical comedy, pure silliness and visual dad jokes goes so fast you won’t want to miss a thing. But this is definitely for kids. You don’t need to know anything about movies to find a flock of sheep, hiding behind a shower curtain, jumping when they hear the famous Psycho sound cue amusing. That noise is actually just one of the sheep flossing their teeth while they’re in there, excuse me. A dance routine that may or may not resemble the “Thriller” music video is funny because it’s a flock of sheep pretending to be zombies. An uncool man fantasizing about picking up his date while “Here Comes the Hotstepper” plays is also objectively hilarious, which you don’t need to know anything about middle-aged dating to appreciate. And as an influencer (voiced by Dani Dyer) keeps getting in the way, a young gentleman glued to his phone misses all the delightful mayhem swirling around him.
One of the most quietly notable things in the first Shaun the Sheep Movie from 2015 was its depiction of a multi-cultural big city, including a woman wearing a hijab. This routine embrace of all different kinds of being English continues in Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom, in which the vet (and the actress voicing her) is a black woman. She even has beads in her hair! The repeated gags of a wedding cake being damaged make no fuss over the fact that it is for two brides, either. This inclusivity in British art set outside of London is still somewhat unusual, but directors Steve Cox and Matthew Walker, working from a script by Mark Burton and Giles Pilbrow, have firmly embraced the cheerful and open-minded Aardman aesthetic.
If there was to be a criticism of this film, it might be that the dynamic between Shaun and the Farmer too closely resembles that between Gromit and Wallace. But that’s also like saying a restaurant’s delicious food is served in portions that are too big. Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom is just so silly, and so much fun, with such playful jokes (including repeated use of the chorus of this song by the otherwise forgotten Welsh band The Automatic) that it’s impossible to dislike. This is one of those funny and cheerful movies kids will watch approximately a billion times, but it’s so good that their moms and dads won’t mind. And my fellow Americans: if you want to understand the pun in the title of the series, try thinking about the similarity to the name ‘Shaun’ and the word ‘shorn’ and how that applies to sheep.
Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom will be in theaters on September 18, 2026.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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