Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom (2026) – Review by Andrea Carnevali

Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom ⭐⭐⭐1/2

On Halloween Eve at Mossy Bottom Farm, excitement turns to dismay when the clumsy Farmer ruins the pumpkin patch. Shaun tries fixing it with science experiments, but things go wrong when a wild beast appears in the woods.

Whenever you sit down to watch an Aardman film, you know you’re in pretty safe hands.

Whether it’s Wallace & Gromit, the previous Shaun the Sheep films or even Arthur Christmas (a classic in our house), there is an unmistakable warmth to everything they do.

Perhaps it’s the handcrafted quality of the animation. In an age when so much cinema feels smooth, weightless and digitally perfected, Aardman’s stop-motion worlds feel wonderfully tangible. You can almost sense the fingerprints on the characters — and often you can actually see them too.

They’re also very, very British: gently ironic, enormously good-natured and packed with little details.

The Beast of Mossy Bottom, Shaun’s third feature-length adventure, delivers pretty much what you’d expect. The animation is impeccable, and the characters remain endlessly charming.

The visual comedy works on two levels. For younger viewers, there’s slapstick, chaos, silly noises and the occasional fart joke. For the grown-ups, there’s a constant stream of cinematic references.

My son and I caught most of them: Psycho, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Back to the Future and plenty more. Part of the fun is seeing how quickly Aardman can sneak them past you.

Unfortunately, the film itself feels a little stretched.

Even at only around eighty minutes, it has the slight feeling of a television episode expanded to feature length without quite enough story to justify it. The jokes are often good, but there simply aren’t enough new ideas to keep the whole thing moving at the same pace.

Perhaps my expectations were too high, given the five-star reviews I had seen everywhere.

Don’t get me wrong: this is a lovely, beautifully made little film, but it never quite reaches the heights of the previous Shaun adventures.

I still think Farmageddon is the high-water mark of the series, while the original Shaun the Sheep Movie remains a wonderful example of just how much story and emotion Aardman can create without a single line of dialogue.

This one is still miles above the average family animation. It has warmth, personality and more craftsmanship in one plasticine sheep than many glossy digital films manage in two hours.

I smiled a lot. Giovanni laughed a few times. And we both had fun spotting the references.

I just wish there was a little bit more to it.

Andrea Carnevali is a Bafta winning film maker who lives in Chiswick, and runs a monthly film club at Chiswick Cinema.