In case you haven’t already met him, Shaun is a claymation sheep, one who’s too smart and too independent for his own good. Initially introduced as a side character in Aardman’s flagship Wallace & Gromit shorts, Shaun the Sheep has since gone on to become a name brand of his own, headlining an eponymous stop-motion TV show in which his mischievous schemes cause great episodic trouble for the farmer & dog that are supposed to be keeping him fenced in. The show is subverbal, with characters exclusively communicating in expressive grunts instead of using their words, which levels the intellectual playing field between the humans and farm animals in the cast. It’s a consistently, cozily delightful set-up for some classic silent comedy gags, and it’s proven to be popular enough to inspire a series of feature-film sequels outside the confines of television. 2015’s Shaun the Sheep Movie played as an action-spectacle escalation of the Shaun the Sheep TV show, dragging Shaun and his fellow barnyard animals off the farm and to The Big City in the George Miller tradition. Then, the series temporarily lost its way in its attempt at Atomic Age sci-fi pastiche in 2019’s Farmageddon, which disrupted the calming simplicity of its silent-comedy-farm-life premise by allowing a cutesy, hyperactive space alien to invade the scene, dragging the whole enterprise down to the low-attention-span antics of a Trolls sequel. Thankfully, while shifting genres to horror pastiche in the newest addition, the Shaun the Sheep franchise has retreated to the warmer tone and core character dynamics that separate Aardman Animations from the lesser, computer-animated DreamWorks of the world. Shaun is back causing covertly anthropomorphic mischief, the farmer gets into exponentially absurd mishaps through no fault of his own, and all the other people & animals hanging around have a sweetly silly time watching their hijinks ensue — this time while hanging Halloween decorations to help each other get into the seasonal mood.

The Beast of Mossy Bottom opens with the farmer and his animals waking at dawn with the creaky mobility of zombies rising from their graves. Once they’re alert and going about their separate days, both halves of the farm set about getting their Halloween plans in order; the farmer works on mustering up the courage to invite the local vet to his town’s annual Halloween Hoedown, while Shaun works on growing a secret pumpkin patch that would allow his fellow sheep to carve traditional jack-o-lanterns behind the farmer’s back. After a gruesome mishap massacres Shaun’s precious pumpkins in a blood-orgy of gourd guts, the determined sheep decides to play mad scientist and invent a growth serum that will rapidly develop new full-size pumpkins from seed in a couple days’ time, so they’ll be ready by Halloween. Only, his mad science experiment works too well, and the pumpkins never stop growing. Naturally, the serum is also mistaken for hair-growth gel by the balding farmer, who thinks he has a better shot at landing a Halloween Hoedown date if he can regrow the luscious locks of his youth. So, Shaun lives out the classic sci-fi horror plot of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein while the farmer finds himself in more of a Peanut Butter Solution rapid-hair-growth situation, of which it’s unclear whether the homage was at all intentional; it’s more important to know that his new hirsute look gets him mistaken for an errant sasquatch monster by freaked-out townsfolk. Certainly, there are blatant, unmistakable callbacks to more famous horror iconography elsewhere, including onscreen references to Psycho, Thriller, Dracula, Night of the Living Dead, and Friday the 13th. Those references are all likely to go over the heads of the children in the target audience, though, the same way that the first Shaun the Sheep movie got away with referencing Taxi Driver, The Terminator, and Silence of the Lambs without offending overly protective parents. It’s the kind of horror-movie-reference starter pack that can acclimate younger viewers to a lifelong genre fandom without immediately scaring them off with the macabre.

This latest Shaun the Sheep outing is Halloween-season kids’ fluff; it also might be the best movie in the series to date. The closest it gets to actively scaring children is in its climactic introduction of a kaiju-scale jack-o-lantern monster, but even that gag is quickly revealed to be all in good fun. Mostly, the scene-to-scene scares are character based, keeping the farm-life silent comedy of the series as simple as possible. For instance, when the town vet visits the farm, everyone is scared for entirely personal reasons: the farmer because he is scared of women, the animals because they’re scared of vaccinations. When the farmer’s Gromit-like hound is tasked to retrieve his missing, sasquatched owner, he visualizes the farmer’s scent as a ghost made of green vaporous stench. The Halloweeny quality of the picture is mostly due to seasonal decor. Jack-o-lanterns, rubber bats, mad-scientist lab equipment, and mysterious monster footprints decorate every set piece, while it’s continually clear that no one is in danger of suffering anything worse than a pratfall. The only real sour note is the film’s department-store pop music soundtrack, which has been a consistent earsore throughout this series. Only, this time the end credits play over a delightfully corny plot-summarizing rap song in Halloween goof-off tradition, so it’s difficult to get too angered up about it. Is The Beast of Mossy Bottom legitimately just as good as the first Shaun the Sheep movie or is its Spirit Halloween Store set decor just an especially pleasant backdrop for its old-school silent comedy gags? It’s difficult to say for sure, but The Beast of Mossy Bottom is unmistakably more successful as a Shaun the Sheep horror pastiche than Farmageddon was as the Shaun the Sheep take on alien-invasion sci-fi. It manages to naturally integrate the holiday into Shaun’s farm-disrupting antics without distracting from the show’s streamlined sitcom premise, and as a result it might incidentally inspire some future monster-movie fandom in impressionable youngsters along the way.

-Brandon Ledet