the times | Saturday December 18 2021 saturday review 5
sage dog character that got cut, sadly?”
Burton asks Cox. “It was a very good joke,
but it just didn’t have a place in the story
at the end. I think it was a heartbreaking
moment for Steve. I think it was a sausage
dog eating a hot dog.”
“We’ll put it in the next one,” Cox
promises.
There are, as usual, allusions in The
Flight that only older viewers are sure to
appreciate — a musical nod to Raymond
Briggs’s seasonal rival The Snowman
among them — but the biggest laughs
come from the intricate choreography of
the slapstick. For example, a flying sleigh
manned (or sheeped) by the stars of Mossy
Bottom crashes into a tree. Laugh one. An
avalanche of snow falls on them. Laugh
two. Then, within the snow, small sheep
eyes open, their owners’ fleeces indist-
inguishable from the snow. Laugh three,munity and not about getting stuff. There’s
a little sense at the Christmas market that
people are cashing in on Christmas, and
you get a feeling by the end of the story
that the Christmas spirit has descended on
Mossy Bottom.”
But only after a lot of snow and gags
have fallen on it first. Like all animations
from Aardman, the Bristol animation
company Park joined in 1985, The Flight is
a triumph of storytelling, made all the
trickier, you would have thought, by
Shaun’s adventures, unlike Wallace’s,
being non-verbal. As I say to Burton,
who originally made money selling jokes
to Radio 4’s Week Ending, he started
working on radio and is now effectively in
silent movies.
“We watched, frankly, a lot of silent
comedy, and there was a sophistication to
those films when you watch them again
in the way they conveyed information. I
mean, they cheated every now and then
with a caption, but actually we found that
if you tell a story well you need dialogue
less and less,” Burton says. “What you do
need to do is let the audience know what’s
going on in the heads of the characters.
That’s always rule No 1 when we’re doing
Shaun: do you know what they’re think-
ing? As long as you do, you’ll follow the
story, and then the comedy just emerges.”
Naturally? “I wouldn’t say naturally. It’s
still really hard. There’s lots of pacing up
and down.”
“Everyone is a comedian in one way or
another at Aardman,” says the new show’s
director, Steve Cox, who has spent 15 years
at Aardman, until recently as an animator.
“Everyone’s got something to offer. One of
our biggest problems was we had too many
jokes at the end and we had to start strip-
ping them out.” Is there an example of a
joke that was cut? “Didn’t you have a sau-
shear delight Top:
Shaun, Timmy, Bitzer
and the Flock enjoying
Christmas dinner. Above:
the Farmer and Bitzer at
the market. Left: the
Twins. Right: Ellathe biggest laugh. “There’s a whole termin-
ology around those things, like ‘tags’ and
‘buttons’ and ‘reveals’, to explain the
mechanics of some of those comic
moments,” Burton says. “That one is a
‘button’, a little comic event at the end of
a scene that leaves you with a smile.”
Like buttoning your coat and you’re
done? “I guess so. It might be an American
phrase that’s come into general use. In
the good old days at the BBC we used to
talk about tags and toppers. So a tag was
the punchline, the snow falling; a topper
was the eyes opening.”
No slapstick would stick, of course, with-
out perfect animation, which these days is
made slightly easier by the sparing use of
CGI and a bank of 3D printers main-
ly used for manufacturing mechan-
ical parts inside the puppets. Most
effects remain old-tech. For
reasons I won’t divulge,
the episode involves a
great many bubbles that
expand and pop. Each is
actually a glass bead.
And then there is the
block of ice that for a
while encases Bitzer the
sheepdog’s head. How did
they do that? “We had that
joke almost from the very
beginning. We thought
it would be great to
put him in a cube, but
we didn’t think about
how we would do
that,” Cox says.
They considered
asking the compu-
ter for help, but
finally settled on
making a small 3D
printed semi-opaqueice box. “His hat pokes out of the cube, and
if you lift up Bitzer’s hat — I’m giving
secrets away now — the lid of the ice cube
comes off and his head comes off with it.
So you can then tweak his eyes and change
his mouth.”
Production was made harder by lock-
down. Animators wore masks, and extra
space needed to be created for them to
keep their distance around the set. Cox
visited them masked and gloved. He felt as
if he were walking into a war zone. The
studio was locked off from the rest of the
building so that the crew formed a Shaun
the Sheep bubble.
There are no references in The Flight to
Covid, but the film does strike some
modern attitudes, with enough new faces
in the story to suggest that multiethnicity
has hit the Mossy Bottom community.
Burton and Cox are alarmed when I tell
them that two bloggers have argued that
The Farmer’s Llamas was xenophobic and
possibly racist. The Peruvian llamas who
had arrived on the farm caused nothing
but trouble: stealing, drinking too much
and destroying a barn. Personally, I say, I
always felt that the llamas represented not
immigrants but adolescent males.
“I think you’re absolutely right,” Burton
says. “We often see Shaun as a ten-year-
old boy. It was about older kids who draw
you into bad influences.”
The accusations are ironic, of course,
given that the Shaun the Sheep series has
been sold to about 180 countries. The Brit-
ish may assume that Mossy Bottom is
located in the West Country near Aard-man’s Bristol HQ, but there is a Shaun the
Sheep Farm Garden in Japan and Shaun
the Sheep Land in Sweden (parents keen
to wean their infants off their dummies
can encourage them to “hang [their] pacifi-
er in Timmy’s pacifier tree”).
Shaun’s flock comprises universal arch-
etypes — gentle giantess Shirley, nervy
Hazel and nominatively determined Nuts,
who has unequal eyes. They speak a non-
sense Esperanto and read illegible signs
and newspapers. Shaun may often be a
Christmas treat, but he is a sheep for all
time zones.
I ask if Burton and Cox are nervous at
the screening at which Park finally sees
the finished film. “He gives advice and
opinions and jokes and he’s very much
involved in helping us develop it, but he’s
not directly involved,” Burton says. “And
there is a moment when we show it
to him and we do hope he likes
it. We always listen to what
he’s got to say because he’s
very smart about things, but
he laughs a lot, actually. He’s
a happy man.”
Will Park be watching The
Flight like the rest of us on
Christmas Day? “Absolutely,”
he replies. “Although I’ve seen
it a few times, there is something
magical about it coming on at its
scheduled time, particularly at
Christmas.” Yes, particularly.
Shaun the Sheep, the Christ-
mas gift that gives on giving,
is an invention worthy of
Wallace himself.
Shaun the Sheep: The Flight
Before Christmas is on
BBC1 on Christmas Eve at
6pm and on Christmas Day
at 11.35am‘That’s always rule
No 1: do you know
what the characters
are thinking?’
ARDMAN ANIMATIONS