Add Shaun the Sheep: the Beast of Mossy Bottom to your watchlist
In an office reception in an unassuming business park in Bristol, there’s an Oscar on display. Other rooms contain multiple Emmys and Baftas. It’s here in Aardman Animations’ secondary studio space, which is located just down the road from their main headquarters, where the third and largest stop-motion Shaun the Sheep film yet has been made. The Beast of Mossy Bottom has 40 units, or sets, double that of a regular Shaun caper. In the company’s 50th year, why not go big?
Shaun the Sheep made his debut on Christmas Eve 1995 in Nick Park’s Wallace and Gromit short film A Close Shave. His cheeky charm and mischievous antics earned him his own series in 2007. “We had to invent a whole world for him, and a whole different look for him,” says animation director Claire Rolls, who worked on the first series of Shaun the Sheep and was part of the early conversations about how he should walk and look. “We have refined him over the years and developed him as we went along: where do his ears look right? What does the curve of his mouth look like? What’s the sweet spot on his head?”
Now, in The Beast of Mossy Bottom, Shaun has evolved yet again…
Spooky, not scary
In 2017, Aardman were discussing half-hour specials, one of which turned into Shaun the Sheep: the Flight Before Christmas, directed by Steve Cox, who co-directs The Beast of Mossy Bottom with Matthew Walker in their feature film directorial debut.
Another idea that cropped up was a Valentine’s story, where the Farmer (voiced by John Sparkes) goes on a date during which Shaun (Justin Fletcher, who also voices Timmy) turns him into a monster. While it didn’t gain legs immediately, co-writers Giles Pilbrow (Horrible Histories, Have I Got News For You) and Mark Burton ( and Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl) evolved the concept and instead set it at Halloween – with some romance thrown in.
It soon expanded far beyond a 30-minute special into a feature film, in which Shaun and the Flock are growing pumpkins for Halloween, but want to keep it a secret from the Farmer and Bitzer the sheepdog. When the Farmer ends up accidentally destroying the pumpkins, Shaun decides to concoct a potion to make them grow rapidly, using a book.
In his science lab inside a disused windmill on the farm, things go terribly awry and a beast is let loose in the woods of Mossingham. Meanwhile, the Farmer goes missing, right before he gets the chance to ask his love interest, the Vet (Nina Sosanya), to the Halloween Hoedown. “The Vet has a lot of potential to pop up in the series. I really hope we see her again,” says Walker. He also sees the possibility for the new locations to appear in the series, including the crumbling windmill and the mysterious, foggy Mossy Bottom docks, where a big scene is set.
Hammer horror films and Universal Monsters were the starting point, but The Beast of Mossy Bottom gradually became more influenced by 1980s B-movie horror and action movies. “We didn’t want to scare the young audience, but we wanted there to be a bit more tension than on previous films – not too scary, but not too safe,” Walker explains.
“We had to tone down a few sequences. Early versions of when the Beast arrives at the farmhouse and the afraid Flock run inside were a bit too scary, so we undercut it with comedy.”
We had to tone down a few sequences that were too scar
Building a mad scientist and his flock
A total of 285 puppets were made for Shaun the Sheep: the Beast of Mossy Bottom, mainly out of Hue Clay (formerly Newplast), with around 20 different forms of Shaun, including his new look. “He’s got a lovely little lab coat that is all handmade and handsewn, but it’s got wire running through the seams and around the bottom edge. It mainly stays snug to his body as you’re animating,” says Rolls. “He hasn’t got his normal hair. He’s got crazy, singed hair where he got electrocuted making the potion.”
Shaun is also equipped with a set of goggles with a torch and different tools attached, and he wears rubber gloves that he found in the farmhouse. “There are four fingers and a thumb, whereas Shaun only has a hoof,” says Rolls. “The fingers are all individually wired so that the animators could make them look like they’re flopping about, empty.”
Shaun also has the right equipment in his lab – art director Andy Brown, who designed it, drew up miniature glassware and then had each piece handblown by Terri Adams, the scientific glassblower in the department of chemistry at the University of Oxford.
There are three standard heads and six standard body shapes that are mixed and matched to form the Flock, which can vary in size from between eight to 20 sheep. “We’ve got three different types of fleece,” says modelmaker Will Harding. “Shaun has a short, dense pile fleece. The Flock have got a slightly larger pile with bigger bobbles. Timmy’s is slightly fluffier and condensed, because he’s a baby.” The fleece is all treated with a mixture of PVA glue and water to stiffen it up to avoid “boiling,” where the fleece – or fur – moves around a lot. “If you watch Wes Anderson films, like , the fur is really boiling and constantly twitches,” says Harding.
A hairy situation
Anderson might enjoy the effect, but it can create major challenges, so what do you do when the directors say that for the Beast, “hairy” is the main priority? “We set out to design a really unique monster, because Godzilla, Alien or the Were-Rabbit all have very distinctive outlines and you know exactly who they are,” says Cox.
“One of the main rules with fur or hair is to just not touch it, unless you have to,” explains Rolls. “It’s fine if hair moves when it’s what we call ‘motivated,’ so it looks like part of the motion. You don’t want it to start moving of its own accord.”
Ten Beasts were created after trying out loads of different faux furs that were then dyed and treated to make them stiff. The Beast is the tallest puppet in the film at approximately 38cm in height; the smallest is a 1cm worm.
One of the main rules with fur is to just not touch it
Getting things moving
The film was shot in under 40 weeks, a pace similar to a half-hour special rather than a feature. Thirty animators and five assistants worked on it, with each animator shooting a couple of seconds of footage per day. “We managed to break our own records by completing 60 shots in one week,” says Rolls.
She worked closely with the modelmakers on the design and then tested the puppets to check they were moving the way the animators needed. For instance, Harding says, “The animators wanted the Vet’s glasses to slip down her nose a little bit so she can push them back up again, so that’s how we designed them.”
It was also important to establish a backstory. “I documented that the Vet is awkward around people, but not animals. So, how often does she touch her glasses? It’s aspects like this that flesh her out, so that everyone believes in her as a character.”
Rolls also created a “bible” for every character in the film, so animators could check what they should and shouldn’t look like and how they should move. These guides are especially crucial for the Beast and the Vet to establish them as new characters.
To animate the Beast, for example, there are points for animation handles to go in his torso and abdomen, front, back and side, and also his head and “antlers”. The fronds of hair at his crown and face are wired to make them easy to move, and there is a winder between the head and body.
“His whole top section is hair, so we could wind it up and down on his shoulders. That helps give it that bounce as if it’s hair when he’s running.”
Fingerprints stay in
Aardman’s attention to detail is painstaking and the craftsmanship astounding, resulting in something that is profoundly human. “Everything is sculpted first, and then you make sure that you don’t get rid of those thumbprints within the sculpt, so they actually transfer across into the silicone or into the hard resin,” explains Harding. “There is always an element of ‘handmade’.”
“The hands-on side of it is very fulfilling. It creates something very warm and relatable. People can see that in our work,” agrees Rolls. “There’s humanity in it that shows through in the imperfections, because we’re not machines and we’re not doing everything exactly perfect. That gives it a charm.”
Easter eggs for Halloween?
Cultural references are what Aardman do best, of course, and there are plenty of funny horror tropes and nods dotted throughout the film, from jump scares, Michael Jackson’s dance routine and the shower scene to a burger van called Cronenburgers (after horror director David Cronenberg), an establishment called (after Stephen King’s ) and even a hockey mask styled after Jason’s from Friday the 13th.
When Timmy lifts up a chainsaw, there’s a label on the side that says “TCM 74”, which stands for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and 1974, the year the film was released. It’s graphic artist Gavin Lines’s job to bury gags like this that you might only catch multiple watches later.
For the eagle-eyed (or should that be the penguin- or chicken-eyed) among you, during one of the scenes at the Vet’s office, you might spot the scariest sight of all: criminal mastermind Feathers McGraw, the sinister penguin who first appeared in , terrorising Wallace and Gromit.
“I pitched the idea to Nick Park [who created and Shaun the Sheep and is an executive producer on this film], who thought it was funny, so we’ve put him in,” says Lines. “He has a very recognisable silhouette – we try to get Feathers in every Aardman film. He’s always one to be spotted.”