A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon (2019)

A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon arrives from Aardman with a UFO, a tentacled child alien named Lu-La, and a Ministry for Alien Detection led by an Agent Red who has spent her life chasing the truth about visitors from To-Pa. Almost nobody speaks. The cast communicates in bleats, grunts, and the occasional slide whistle of slapstick, which means any message the film might wish to deliver would have to be delivered physically, through a chase, a combine harvester, or a sheep launched from a catapult. The film chooses the catapult.

By the standards of the current cultural moment, this is a fascinatingly empty object. The Farmer builds a theme park called Farmageddon to fund a new harvester, and the film treats his greed as a joke about a man who wants a better tractor, not as an indictment of late capitalism. Agent Red is a woman in command of a government agency, and the film never once asks us to applaud this. Shirley is a large sheep. No statement is made. Lu-La is a child who misses her parents, which is a universal condition and not a position paper. The movie's entire ethical universe consists of helping a lost kid get home and not pressing buttons on someone else's spaceship.

We search for a sermon and find only a dog, a flock, and a robot named Muggins. There is no lecture here, no climate parable, no revision of history, no discourse of any kind. The film offers craft instead: plasticine, patience, and a plot that resolves the moment a distress signal reaches the sky. It belongs to an earlier dispensation, when a children's film could be funny and expect nothing from its audience beyond attention. The tasting note is brief. Clean, bright, no additives.