At the farm nobody will be able to hear your bleats

Shaun the Sheep and his ovine companions return to the big screen in a year when other cinematic sheep (the protagonists of the hilarious The Sheep Detective) threatened to overshadow them. Luckily, there is room for everyone on the farm. The third feature from the popular stop-motion franchise created by Aardman studio, to whom we owe classics such as Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Chicken Run, once again presents a story filled with brilliant visual gags and a carefully crafted, artisanal aesthetic proposal that reaches its maximum expression in the scenes in the tower-laboratory where Shaun, turned into a woolly version of Dr. Frankenstein, creates a potion that will transform the bald Farmer into a terrifying furry monster.

The formula for the three Shaun feature films is as simple as it is effective, and it recalls the successes of the prodigious original animated series: total confidence in the inexhaustible resources of physical and visual comedy, the absence of dialogue, and a commitment to intertextuality and the constant referencing of canonical works and genres in the history of cinema. Thus, if the previous film in the saga (Farmageddon, released as Farmageddon here at home) cleverly recycled themes and icons from science fiction, The Flight Before Christmas does the same with horror cinema and, specifically, with the Universal monsters. Perhaps the rhythm drops in the second act (a fact that never happens in the dizzying and inventive original series), but a baa-rilliant finale makes up for it.