Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015)

Shaun the Sheep Movie arrives from Aardman with a 99 percent approval rating and no discernible interest in improving anyone. The plot concerns a bored sheep, a caravan, an amnesiac farmer who becomes a celebrity hairdresser, and an animal control officer of unusual persistence. Dialogue is jettisoned almost entirely. The remainder is slapstick, barnyard noises, and elaborate visual contraptions. The farmer is hospitalized. The flock disguises itself as human beings. A bull settles the final confrontation. These are jokes, not arguments. It is, by the standards of contemporary family entertainment, almost recklessly unpurposeful.

This department found little to log. The voice cast includes Omid Djalili as the villain, a bit of cosmopolitan hiring that carries no stated agenda and no thematic weight. Female sheep populate the flock, including Timmy's mother and a stray dog named Slip, but the film advances no argument on their behalf. The large sheep Shirley exists to be a battering ram. The odd-eyed sheep Nuts exists to be odd-eyed. The rural-versus-urban contrast is played for comedy, not for environmental lament. The hairdressing satire pokes at celebrity vanity without reaching for an economic thesis. No historical record is revised. No moral is delivered.

That last point deserves emphasis. Critics praised the film for having no lessons to learn and no faults to admonish, which is a polite way of saying it refuses the entire modern instructional project. It simply wants to be funny, and it largely is. We are obliged to record this as a near-total absence of social consciousness, and we do so without complaint. Its Academy Award nomination was earned on craft alone. A sequel followed. So did a third. The sheep endure.