Finally, some good news this week: some small part of the British film industry is doing exactly the job expected of it. It may not be insignificant that this sector is as close as we now have to a cottage industry, the work of West Country artisans - Bristol's Aardman - making merry magic with vast balls of modelling clay. Where 2019's Farmageddon was the Shaun the Sheep franchise's bucolic alien-invasion movie, The Beast of Mossy Bottom - emerging in cinemas ahead of Hallowe'en - is more conventional mad science, being a cautionary tale on a subject these animators surely know all too well: the need to correctly label the containers in which you store your gloopy fluids. Our friend the farmer - part Eric Morecambe, part Robert Lloyd of The Nightingales; as voiced by John Sparkes, possibly the single funniest character in the British cinema right now - runs out of hair tonic ahead of a potential date with the local vet (Nina Sosanya). At the same time, young Shaun, in mad scientist mode, refills an empty tonic bottle with the formula he's concocted to revive the pumpkin patch he and his ovine pals have been secretly cultivating. On the plus side, the formula yields the biggest pumpkins known to man, or sheep; on a less positive note, Farmer mistakenly applies said formula to his own pumpkin (his baldy head), immediately transforming him into a hirsute glam rocker (massive ginger mullet, free-flowing 'tache), then some furry combination of Bigfoot, the Honey Monster and the Kukeri costume from Toni Erdmann, a look that prompts not the admiration for which he was hoping, but a combination of terror and chuckles wherever he stumbles.
The initial script meeting had to have been as short and sweet as Shaun himself: what's the set-up that could generate the most sight gags over the course of 80 minutes? This is it, or cheeringly close to it. So we get big sight gags: a transformation sequence straight out of a classic horror B-movie (only, you know, rendered in plasticine), a rollicking setpiece involving two tethered vehicles barrelling through a built-up area. We get smaller, blink-of-an-eye sight gags, too: throwaway observations about the behavioural patterns of delivery drivers, phone-obsessed youths, cats and angry mobs (topical); the farmer, attempting an impromptu body wax with electrical tape, lets loose a scream so loud and far-reaching it curls a shop's "NOW OPEN" banner so it simply reads "OW". And it squeezes all of the above in while remaining miraculously wordless - great for pre-verbal youngsters, even better for international markets; these filmmakers have built upon - and refined - what Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson were doing back in the day with Mr. Bean. Mossy Bottom yields some of Aardman's most gorgeous cinematography (care of Charles Copping): the autumnal forest 'the Beast' escapes into, a tableau of foggy desolation on the docks. Throughout - in the absence of spoken words - the sound designers work expressive wonders with gasps of wonder and terror, exasperated sighs and at one point even a sea shanty the sheep cobble together as part of their masterplan. Faced with further evidence of Aardman's collective fondness for Heath Robinson-like contraptions, you realise these films are themselves machines: they go like the clappers, emitting strange noises, while finding fixes or swerves for looming story obstacles. (There's a lovely moment towards the end here, as the creatives realise they've backed themselves into a corner with their 'no talking' rule and hit upon an ancient solution: hieroglyphs. Hey, if it worked for the Egyptians...) Carefully calibrated, lovingly maintained, its every ratchet falling in the right place, Mossy Bottom is a machine designed to throw endless custard pies and slap a smile on your face; it's too good, and too joyful, just to be left to kids.
Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
No comments:
Post a Comment