Familiar with Shaun the Sheep?
Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon is a 2019 stop-motion animated science fiction comedy film produced by Aardman Animations and was directed by Richard Phelan and Will Becher. This is a standalone sequel based on the 2015 film, ‘Shaun the Sheep Movie’ and to a Claymation series, ‘Shaun the Sheep’.
The story revolves around Shaun the Sheep who goes on a mission when an alien with amazing superpowers crash-lands near Mossy Bottom Farm. The missions is to shepherd the intergalactic visitor home before a sinister organization caption her.
Belcher and Phelan had a really fantastic time brainstorming the ideas on how this film will look like. According to the two directors, Robots, secret government organizations and aliens coming to the farm. ‘We looked at everything from the ‘50s through to modern sci-fi. It was great to go back and just watch all the films.”
There’s a lot of classic sci-fi films references all throughout the movie including: Alien, Back To The Future, Close Encounters With The Third Kind, and E.T.
Aside from that, they also added references from two modern day sci-films like Gravity and Interstellar.
The goal for this film to happen is to go bigger and explore a genre that hasn’t been done before. With these, they explored the art style and the diverse color palette they will be using. They looked into a bio-luminescent fish as inspiration for the colors used in the film and they played with a lot of colors and painted the set in UV paint.
According to Phelan, the challenge was to create this film in an epic manner. “It’s bright under certain lights,” Phelan explained. “The underground glares in this surgical blue light, and then there’s the white light, too.” The challenge was making all the different environments work, but once it did, the film captures that sense of adventure through its visuals.
This is a very adorable film with major twists and emotional beats that will delight viewers of all ages. The characters have their own distinct personalities that are remarkable and referential humor sets the mood up high. This is a lightweight movie giving you a cinematic approach full of charms and wits.
