You’ll never have quite as much fun at Halloween as when you’re a child. Or, a sheep – as eager audiences all over the world are about to discover in Shaun the Sheep: The Beast Of Mossy Bottom.
“Setting this story at Halloween, and with all the spooky shenanigans that the season involves, means that this movie is packed with a lot of stuff that you have just never seen in a Shaun movie before,” says its producer, Richard Beek.
“It’s still going to have that beautiful handmade quality, but now with a spooky Halloween twist to it all. And it’s going to be very cinematic, we’ve got more scope to expand this world, to take you to new places, give you sillier and more involved jokes, and play with bigger ideas.”
Shaun the Sheep: The Beast Of Mossy Bottom sees the residents of Mossy Bottom Farm looking forward to Halloween – until the clumsy Farmer trashes the Flock’s beloved pumpkin patch! When Shaun turns Mad Scientist to fix the problem, things rapidly spiral out of control… With The Farmer missing and a wild beast roaming the woods of Mossingham, all the ingredients are in place for a monstrously fun family adventure.
For the filmmakers at Aardman, the legendary Bristol-based stop motion animation studio, it’s fair to say that Halloween has proved to be a time of year that comes loaded with almost limitless creative possibilities. A chance to take a character who is a bonafide national treasure and plunge him into a world of gloriously ghoulish scrapes – to transform his whole world into something else altogether.
“The idea was to take a character and a place we all know and love so much,” says one of the men at this movie’s helm, Steve Cox, who co-directs with old pal and collaborator Matthew Walker, “and make it feel at once the same and totally brand-new.”
Aardman has of course explored the family-friendly edges of the horror genre before, in an adventure that featured their other most famous heroes, in Wallace & Gromit: The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit. But this is Shaun’s first foray into the dark side. And you would be, its makers say, as bonkers as a mad scientist to miss it.
“The Beast Of Mossy Bottom is Aardman’s homage to spooky British fun horror that we all love so much,” says chief creative director Sarah Cox. “Everyone in this studio has got a particular obsession with this film because we all love a transformation monster story – all that very atmospheric stuff that is spooky but not too scary!”
Their initial manifesto, says co-director Matthew Walker, who credits the work of Aardman as the reason he became fascinated by animation in the first place, was “to very much make a genre film,” but by leaning into the sheer fun of the Halloween season rather than anything more sinister.
In doing so, the team felt they would be able to continue an imaginative upwards trajectory they had begun over a decade ago with Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015), Shaun’s first feature film made in partnership with STUDIOCANAL, and amplify its possibilities. To test Shaun as a character, and themselves as filmmakers, more than they ever had before.
That first film, a bold foray from Shaun’s traditional 7-minute television episodes that took him into a brave new world of epic, boundary-stretching cinematic adventures, proved to be a box office smash, pulling in over $100 million worldwide and establishing the mischievous young sheep’s credentials as a woolly movie star.
So it was that for his sequel, A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon, four years later, Aardman made the call to go where no sheep had gone before. Where the first movie had taken Shaun and his pals out of the farm that they call home and out into the wilds of the city, for the second they would go positively intergalactic, dabbling in the sci-fi genre as Mossy Bottom Farm was visited by a cute pink and blue extraterrestrial named Lu-La.
The hugely positive critical and commercial reaction to that sequel did two things simultaneously: confirming that taking Shaun bigger and bolder was something audiences would readily embrace, and opening the team’s eyes to fresh directions, whilst always remaining true to the beating, bleating heart of what made him and his world so special. After his close encounter of the sci-fi kind, nothing was off the table.
This kind of creative ambition and willingness to explore should, really, come as no surprise. Since its foundation in 1976, via the likes of British TV legend Morph, and the groundbreaking music video for Peter Gabrielle’s iconic 1986 track Sledgehammer, through Creature Comforts, Wallace & Gromit and Chicken Run, Aardman has become one of the most successful and celebrated animation studios anywhere in the world, racking up a ludicrous amount of awards and accolades including four Oscars and 18 BAFTAs. Its founders, Peter Lord and David Sproxton, were rightfully both knighted for their endeavours in King Charles’ Honour’s List just this year.
In fact, so respected are they within the industry that the studio receives regular visits from their equally celebrated peers, with directors as diverse as Guillermo Del Toro and Studio Ghibli’s legendary Hayao Miyazaki popping in occasionally to get a privileged up-close perspective on their revered stop motion craft. On The Beast Of Mossy Bottom, it was the turn of double-Oscar-winning director Brad Bird, to swing by, him sharing a sneak peek at his latest, Ray Gunn, in return.
Audiences first had the pleasure of meeting Shaun the Sheep in 1995, in Aardman’s Wallace & Gromit short A Close Shave. Such a breakout star was he that ever since Shaun has fronted his own show, which has now run to seven series and 190 episodes, while inspiring its own hugely successful spin-off Timmy Time, which follows the enthusiastic antics of the little ball of fun who is about to enjoy a further spin-off too, in next year’s Let’s Go Timmy!
Indeed, it’s the beautiful and touching relationship between Shaun and Timmy that provided the launchpad for regular Shaun writers Mark Burton and Giles Pilbrow to turn The Beast Of Mossy Bottom into the epic and thrilling experience that audiences worldwide are about to enjoy.
Originally, the team at Aardman had been noodling with an idea for a Valentine’s short, in which The Farmer, the hapless human in nominal charge of the farm on which he, his dog Bitzer and Shaun and his friends live, would go on a date, only for his noble romantic intentions to be kiboshed by an unfortunate outbreak of rapid hair growth.
But then the concept evolved outwards, expanding into a story told on an autumnal canvas that the creatives had never had the chance to explore before. “A canvas that gave us the chance to tell a completely new kind of Shaun story,” notes Beek.
Besides, when you think about it, Beek suggests, there is a definite logic in merging the established world of Shaun with the spooky season. “The mechanics of how you get to a laugh – which we know how to do very well – and a scream are actually very similar,” the producer smiles. “Every scare in this is undercut by something funny that the audience will find charming, so it was right in our wheelhouse.”
The set-up to the story of The Beast Of Mossy Bottom is this: it’s the run-up to Halloween and Shaun and his fellow sheep, at the behest of an excited Timmy, have made a secret pumpkin patch, hidden behind a false wall on their farm, to grow a bunch of pumpkins to be plump and ready for carving scary faces into at Halloween.
All is looking set for an evening of seriously spooky fun, until two days before Halloween, after a visit from brand new character The Vet, voiced by Nina Sosanya, of Good Omens, His Dark Materials and Baby Reindeer acclaim, an accident involving a goat and a washing line pegged with The Farmer’s old socks and leopard-print Y-fronts sees the pumpkin patch accidentally demolished.
With every one of their festive fruits destroyed, their squashes well and truly squashed, Timmy is distraught, looking up at Shaun with tears in his eyes. And, as anyone with even a passing knowledge of Shaun the Sheep will know, it is a problem that Shaun will do everything in his power to fix.
So it is that when Shaun later stumbles upon an old science book, discarded years ago in a box in the shed, our intrepid hero hatches a plan to save the day. Fashioning himself his own makeshift mad scientist outfit from items he finds on the tip, Shaun decides to concoct a rapid-growth potion that, if his equations are right, will turn one of the remaining pumpkin seeds into a bumper new crop within just 48 hours.
What Shaun doesn’t foresee, of course, are the literally monstrous consequences to him trying to alter the natural course of things. And when the remainder of his potion finds its way, through a series of classic Shaun mishaps, into an empty bottle of hair growth serum and smeared into the balding scalp of an unaware (and, for now, unnamed) character trying to grow their once-luscious locks back in time for a Halloween barn dance, The Beast is born.
Can Shaun find the antidote and save the day before The Beast causes havoc and panic in the townspeople? Will Timmy get to carve his beloved pumpkins on Halloween? And can The Beast ever turn back into the person they once were?
It’s fair to say that the stakes are higher than ever before in the world of Shaun the Sheep. And that world has therefore mutated accordingly. In The Beast Of Mossy Bottom, Aardman’s most ambitious, electrifying and exhilarating movie to date, families will experience environments, colour palettes, characters and locations they have never seen, from the imposing and creepy windmill in which Shaun builds his makeshift lab to the fog-cloaked mysteries of Mossingham Docklands, in a rip-roaring chase to save The Beast and Halloween season itself.
“The Beast Of Mossy Bottom is the third Shaun movie, but this isn’t like a threequel. This is a film that stands on its own as a really great family adventure with Shaun at the heart of it,” says Beek, who was also a producer on Farmageddon and Shaun the Sheep: The Flight Before Christmas, as well as 2024’s Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.
“This movie is going to be massive,” agrees Steve Cox, who also has a long and illustrious history with his pint-sized hero. “We’ve tried to push the boundaries by making everything in this big. Everything is absolutely epic. We’ve got a huge cargo ship, a huge derelict windmill, and the monster, he is huge, big and hairy. Even Shaun’s hair is big. So, I would say it’s going to be a hairy experience all round.”
A hair-raising odyssey in every way that, in typical Aardman style, crams in an array of clever, cheeky nods and references to a succession of classic movies and characters from cinema history, The Beast Of Mossy Bottom leans gently and wittily into the spirit of horror by channeling everything from the Universal monster movies of the 1930s and ‘40s, all the way up to the spooky hits of the 1980s that its makers grew up so adoring.
But what it achieves more than anything is showing a new side to its leading sheep, with Shaun having to go on a perilous journey of self-discovery the likes of which he has never had to face.
Where the first Shaun moviewas at its core a parent-child tale that saw Shaun saving and bonding with an amnesiac Farmer father-figure, then Farmageddon explored his sibling relationships through both Bitzer and Lu-La, The Beast Of Mossy Bottom will take audiences into fascinatingly fresh territory. No sheep, we will discover, is an island.
“Shaun is a very playful and optimistic character, and always has been,” observes Walker, of his and Cox’s compelling alternative direction; one rich with dramatic opportunity and the chance to show fans Shaun in a different light.
“He is very inventive, approaches everything with a sense of fun and optimism, and he’s also got a cheeky side. It’s his inventiveness and creativity that drives a lot of his stories because he has always been known for his creative solutions to problems. His heart is always in the right place, but he definitely makes mistakes. And, in this film, he gets a bit carried away in that respect!”
In fact, in The Beast Of Mossy Bottom, Shaun arguably makes his most catastrophic error of all time. Not just by creating a potion that will birth a fearsome beast but in how he reacts to the predicament.
“Shaun is the sheep that the flock always turns to,” Walker says. “But in this film, he gets a bit of what I call, ‘movie-star syndrome’. What he needs to learn is that he can’t do everything on his own. That he needs his family. That’s what makes this film different. Because this film is about family. How we all need one, and that includes Shaun…”
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