A woolly hero who is the best in his field: BRIAN VINER reviews Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom

Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom

Rating: Five out of five stars 

There are plenty of contenders for the title of Britain's greatest-ever fictional hero. Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Miss Marple, Doctor Who … it's a crowded field. 

But only one contender is entirely at home in an actual field, setting a high baa for all the others with his charisma and irrepressible sense of adventure.

Yes, Shaun is back, leading the Mossy Bottom flock on yet another improbably nutty escapade, brilliantly rendered in stop-motion clay animation.

Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom is the third feature film led by everyone's favourite ovine mischief-maker. 

The Shaun the Sheep Movie in 2015 was, in the broadest possible cinematic terms, a parody of a psychological thriller in which the Farmer was stricken by amnesia. 

A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon (2019) riffed gloriously on the extra-terrestrial sci-fi genre.

This one is an exuberant horror-film pastiche, in which Shaun himself takes on the mantle of the mad scientist. As with pretty much everything else made by those ingenious and meticulous folk at Aardman Animations, it's a joy.

With Halloween coming up, the Farmer has eyes for Mossingham's comely young vet, and she (rather less explicably) for him. 

Each plans to invite the other to the forthcoming Halloween Hoedown, but instead of romance brewing when she visits Mossy Bottom Farm to inoculate the animals, havoc is unleashed instead.

After the Farmer gets tangled up in a washing-line festooned with his underpants, which the Vet has extracted from a goat's stomach, he careers destructively into a pumpkin patch which Shaun and his fellow sheep are secretly cultivating to carve into lanterns. 

All the pumpkins are obliterated. Aghast at the loss, Shaun then goes into Dr Frankenstein mode, creating a rapid-growth serum and using it on a remaining pip so that it might speedily restore the crop.

Unfortunately, the Farmer, eager to impress the Vet, mistakes the serum for hair-restorer cream. At first he's delighted with the results, his desperate comb-over giving way to a Rod Stewart-style coiffure. 

But the hair keeps growing, eventually turning him into a kind of shaggy orange yeti, rampaging round the area mainly because he can't see where he's going. 

The Vet, consulting a Book of Mystical Creatures (which along with an entry on the Loch Ness Monster, contains a page on Wombles), concludes that a Bigfoot is at large. 

The townsfolk are duly terrified, as is Shaun until he realises what has happened and, determined as ever to fix things himself, concocts ways to put it right.

Needless to add, all this unfolds with madcap gusto. Mark Burton, co-writer with Giles Pilbrow, worked on Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) and there are echoes of that, with nods throughout to familiar horror-movie tropes and even a playful reference, if you can imagine such a thing, to the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 masterpiece, Psycho. 

The screeching string music, designed by Psycho composer Bernard Herrmann to evoke violent stabbing, here turns out to be the sound of a sheep flossing its teeth.

As always with Aardman films, every frame is calculated to appeal to children or grown-ups or both. 

There's the hilarious sight of the Farmer's loyal sheepdog, Bitzer, trotting out of his kennel to solemnly dispose of his own poo bag. And a sudden fleeting burst of The Archers theme tune made me laugh out loud.

But The Beast of Mossy Bottom is further elevated by little flourishes of seriousness. I wouldn't go so far as to suggest that directors Steve Cox and Matthew Walker are scoring political points, but they certainly have fun turning that most ugly of spectacles, the lynch mob, into an object of comedy.

Aardman's masterstroke with Shaun the Sheep was not to muck things up with dialogue. It's one reason why, like Mr Bean, he has become one of Britain's greatest cultural exports. 

There's a Shaun theme park in Sweden, for heaven's sake, and a life-sized recreation of Mossy Bottom Farm in Japan. This delightful film can only enhance the brand. Fans should flock to see it.

Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom opens in cinemas on Friday