Farmageddon

Directed by Will Becher and Richard Phelan, Farmageddon follows Shaun the Sheep as he’s forced to spring into action after a spaceship carrying an alien child crashes near Mossy Bottom Farm – with the narrative detailing Shaun’s efforts at returning said child home before a sinister government agent catches up with them. Filmmakers Becher and Phelan, working from Mark Burton and Jon Brown’s screenplay, deliver a mostly affable piece of work that benefits substantially from its top-tier animation and proliferation of appealing characters, with, in terms of the latter, Shaun’s long-since-confirmed status as a seriously compelling, charismatic protagonist heightening the impact of several broadly-conceived sequences and, in addition, ensuring that the figure’s bond with the aforementioned alien child remains one of the picture’s most engaging elements (ie there’s genuine chemistry between the two). It’s clear, then, that Farmageddon‘s pervasively lighthearted (and kid-friendly) atmosphere prevents the viewer from entirely connecting to its exceedingly thin storyline, while the predictably frenetic climactic stretch, which is riddled with over-the-top bits of physical comedy, is perhaps not quite as exciting or compelling as Becher and Phelan have presumably intended – with the end result an entertaining-enough Aardman release that probably would’ve worked better as a half-hour short.

**1/2 out of ****