Shaun the Sheep: Hollywood embraces Aardman Animations

If Shaun the Sheep could talk, he would probably still have been lost for words this weekend after wowing Hollywood.

Wallace & Gromit couldn’t do it, neither could Hugh Grant’s pirate captain nor the hapless Arthur Christmas. But now a 17cm-tall modelling-clay sheep is on the brink of conquering America for Aardman Animations.

If Shaun the Sheep could talk, he would probably still have been lost for words this weekend as Hollywood embraced his British animators with fervour.

The quirky Bristol-based company’s latest full-length film, the silent stop-motion adventure Shaun the Sheep Movie, was released in the US on Wednesday to ecstatic reviews. It now has a 99 per cent rating on the review aggregating website Rotten Tomatoes, the second best score this year.

The acclaim coincided with Hollywood rolling out the red carpet for Aardman, with a weekend of events in Los Angeles organised by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which has previously handed the company four Oscars. There was a panel discussion about the company at Siggraph, the computer-graphics conference at the LA Convention Centre, an animation workshop and special screenings of restored Wallace & Gromit short films.

For Aardman, this was a triumphant return to a city where it has not always flourished. In 1999, it signed a lucrative five-film production deal with the Hollywood studio Dreamworks and scored an early hit with the farmyard caper Chicken Run. It proved to be the only one of their collaborations that made money. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit won an Oscar but made a reported $25million loss. The company experimented with computer animation for Flushed Away and reviews suffered. The Dreamworks deal was cancelled two films early.

David Sproxton, co-owner of Aardman, said: “We’ve learnt over the years that every nation tells its stories in its own way, and we in Bristol find it quite hard to make a classic Hollywood blockbuster that would play to middle America.”

Aardman signed a three-year deal instead with Sony Pictures Animation, which was renewed but may now have expired. They made two films together. Arthur Christmas, the company’s first 3D animation, about Father Christmas’s son, took only $46m of its global $147m in the US. The big budget The Pirates! In an Adventure With Scientists!, in which Grant played an inept pirate captain, won an Oscar but also made most of its money outside America.

Shaun the Sheep was made in a one-off financing deal with the French company Studio Canal. Its creators have said that the budget was significantly lower than for Pirates!

That will have offset disappointment at the film’s early US box office performance, which experts said placed it on course to earn $5m over its opening five days.

Aardman, and its distributor Lionsgate, will be hoping that Shaun becomes a hit over the longer term. The sheep, who began life as a character in the Wallace & Gromit short film A Close Shave, has steadily become Aardman’s most lucrative character. Some 140 episodes of his TV series have been sold to more than 170 countries, edging out even Wallace & Gromit and paving the way for his first feature film.

James Verniere of the Boston Herald called it “the best animated film of the year, another Aardman gem”.

Peter Hammond for Deadline Hollywood said: “The style and humour of this piece ... is reminiscent of Jacques Tati or even Chaplin.”

The Times