Shaun the Sheep - The Movie
In recent times, as most of my readers know, the only movies that we have been going to, are cartoon movies. Two reasons behind this are - this way the kid and we can enjoy together (RoI is very important - since we are spending a sh** load of money on movie tickets) and secondly, the wife and me have started becoming impatient with respect to movies (partly due to watching recorded movies on Tata Sky Plus at home - where we can forward all the unwanted junk!).Anyways, the cartoon movie scene in Bangalore does not help too much. Except big scale movies from big movie houses (read: Disney), all other cartoon movies barely cross a week in theatres. Same was the case with "Shaun the Sheep". It release the weekend of the Independence Day (Aug 14 weekend) and by Aug 21 weekend, it was running one show in one theatre (and irony - the theatre farthest from where we live). But no, that did not deter us. We hauled it from Koramangala to the Orion Mall Rajaji Nagar for the 4PM show.
The wife and me (and the kid, incidentally) have been big fans of Shaun the Sheep cartoons on tv. If you have not, go to youtube and search. They are fun, clean, and smallish cartoon strips about a bunch of sheep, one of them being Shaun. Ofcourse Shaun, being the pratagonist, is smarter and more quick witted than the rest.
We went to this movie with a single thought - how could you make a cartoon strip which typically runs as a filler in the cartoon channels (most of the strips are 5-7 minutes long) as a whole movie. But the director has done a commendable job. The movie does not leave you fidgetting your thumbs. It is a fast paced movie.
The jokes are clean, which will leave young and old chuckling - very typical of the usual Shaun the sheep strips. None of the jokes leave you cracking up, but keeps you chuckling through the movie. Very nice animation. And hey, get this, there is not a single dialog in the movie - just like in the strip. The only person capable of speaking, the farmer, also just makes unintelligible noises, but that is it.
Very well done movie. One hour and 15 minutes of pure fun.