In the UK, Aardman marks its 50th anniversary with a new Shaun the Sheep film
In Bristol, United Kingdom, animation studio Aardman Animations is preparing to premiere the feature film «Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom» and is marking its 50th anniversary. This will be the third feature-length film about Shaun the Sheep, due to be released in UK cinemas on September 18, 2026. Asharq Al-Awsat reports on the studio’s work.
In the new film, Shaun and his flock must save Halloween from a creature terrorizing the pumpkin patch at Mossy Bottom Farm. The studio team worked on the project for three and a half years.
More than 100,000 frames
Aardman was founded in 1976 in Bristol by Peter Lord and David Sproxton. The studio is known for the characters Wallace and Gromit, as well as Shaun the Sheep. It works with stop-motion animation: character movement is created by photographing models in sequence after the smallest changes to their poses.
About 40 small filming sets with puppet scenery have been arranged in the studio’s basement. They include Mossy Bottom Farm in autumn colors, a mad scientist’s laboratory, and a black-and-red fishing boat.
More current news is available on the UA.News Telegram channel Telegram.
Animation director Claire Rolls explained that the animators’ goal is to convince viewers that the puppets are alive. Over two days of painstaking work, an animator can shoot about two seconds of footage, while each second consists of 24 frames. The full film contains more than 100,000 such stop-motion-created images.
Spare parts for characters
The puppets are made in the studio’s puppet department. Its head, Kate Anderson, said that interchangeable facial parts are created for Bitzer, the sheepdog from the Shaun stories, including different versions of the mouth and jaw. They help convey the character’s sounds and emotions.
For expressive parts of the puppets, including faces, craftspeople use plasticine, while bodies are sometimes made of silicone over a metal armature. Since animators constantly touch the models, they can break, so the studio keeps spare sheep hands and ears.
Co-director Steve Cox described stop-motion animation as similar to a live performance, since once a scene is completed, it is not possible to simply return to it and change everything. Producer Richard Beek said that artificial intelligence was not used in the new film, while digital effects were used only as a supplement to manual work.
