First and most importantly: the title of A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon can be parsed as a meaning-carrying phrase in English, and is thus a substantial improvement on its 2015 predecessor, Shaun the Sheep Movie, whose title is a syntactically incoherent mash-up of nouns. This is, I’m a little sad the say, one of […]

Let us be honest: Early Man is a little bit dumb. Or it is, at any rate, so unbelievably silly that it comes off as dumb, albeit dumb on purpose. The latest film produced by the great Bristol-based Aardman Animations, and the first feature directed by the studio’s creative soul Nick Park since 2005’s Wallace […]

I will likely never get over the grisly syntax of its title, but in all other ways, Shaun the Sheep Movie is a miraculous film. It is gripped by a gentleness in both tone and worldview that has been almost totally invisible in children’s cinema in the English speaking world for years upon years – […]

There is perhaps no non-romantic reason for being excited about The Pirates! Band of Misfits just because it is a stop-motion movie, the first made by Aardman Animation since 2005; but this space has always been dedicated to the romanticisation of old-school filmmaking and traditional cartooning techniques, and I find no reason to feel guilty […]

Given that “Christmas” is right there in the title, Arthur Christmas is surprisingly less of a holiday movie than you might think, and much more of a standard-issue CGI cartoon based heavily on the Pixar model, right down to the third-act slapstick chase that quickly morphs into a warm and gooey sentimental ending. It is, […]

It is with all due humility that I admit that a film that I hadn’t really been looking forward to turned out to be one of the funniest films I’ve seen all year. I give you: Flushed Away, the third Aardman Animation feature released through Dreamworks, and the first to be wholly computer-animated. If you […]