I wouldn’t normally write up a movie like Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon, now on Netflix, one of the nominees for this year’s Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, because it’s ostensibly a kids’ movie – and I say that as someone who has long loved Shaun the Sheep and Aardman stuff in general. The first StS season came out when my daughter was maybe 3 or 4, and she and I would watch them together and laugh, and her giggle would just make me laugh some more. The episode in season 1 where the sheep are visited by a couple of mischievous aliens helped my daughter come to the conclusion that “aliens have one eye, monsters have two eyes.” (It’s still one of my favorites.)
The first Shaun the Sheep movie was also nominated for an Oscar, and it was funny, but frivolous. That was a great movie for kids, one that you could enjoy as an adult, but not something that had a second layer for the older parts of the audience like most Pixar movies do. Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon, a stand-alone sequel, goes way beyond the first movie, though. It is absolutely packed with references and callbacks to classic science fiction, from H.G. Wells to Doctor Who to 2001 to The X-Files to E.T., over 50 Easter eggs that I saw myself (I watched it twice to try to spot more) and that I read about online after watching. And it’s still really funny, with great sight gags (there is no dialogue in any Shaun the Sheep films or episodes … they are sheep, after all) and a plot that winks at conventions of sci-fi in general and the hoary alien-visitation gag in particular.
Shaun is the ringleader of the sheep at Mossy Bottom Farm where, as with the titular animals in Chicken Run, the sheep are organized, and often try to outwit The Farmer (not that hard) and his dog/foreman Bitzer (a bit harder) to try to get more food, have more fun, or annoy the asshole pigs who live next door. (The pigs are, sadly, not in Farmageddon enough.) This time around, though, they have a visitor – an alien child named Lu-La who crashes their spaceship nearby and ends up in the Farmer’s barn, unbeknownst to the Farmer, who sees a news report about the old man who said he saw the spaceship and decides to capitalize by building a ramshackle attraction he calls Farmageddon. What that really means, of course, is that he makes Bitzer and the sheep build it, while Shaun and Lu-La try to hide from everyone around – including the very Scully-like Agent who is determined to find the spaceship and capture Lu-La.
Hijinks ensue, as they always do when Shaun is involved, but the great surprise of this movie is that it is absolutely packed with allusions, references, callbacks, in-jokes, and more. One Doctor Who bit my daughter and I caught just slayed us, and apparently there’s another one we missed around the Fourth Doctor that was somewhere in the background. There’s a symbol in a pizza box right when Shaun and Lu-La first meet that I didn’t catch the first time around, but it was one of at least two references to that particular movie – and I got the second one. There’s a mechanic’s shop called H.G. Wheels. The Agent’s code to access a locked room is a reference. There are just so many things to catch in this movie that there are still more I haven’t, and I don’t even think the few lists I’ve seen of Easter eggs and trivia are close to complete.
I recognize that in-jokes and allusions don’t make a movie great, but everything Shaun the Sheep is at least good enough, and this sequel has a more entertaining plot than the original. I know Soul is the favorite for the Oscar, but, man, I’d watch this for a third or fourth time before I watched that a second time.