A story of memory loss, alienation, and urban squalor ...

. . . It's Shaun the Sheep! The new feature from Aardman Animations, creators of Wallace and Gromit and Creature Comforts, is also funny, intelligent, and heart-warming, and its soundtrack is good music. All that helps explain why the movie probably won't may not make a lot of money in the United States.

American audiences like cynical, condescending, manipulative, bland, relentlessly age-appropriate fare for their "children's" movies and television, soundtracked with crappy upbeat pop music, or so moviemakers and marketers seem to think. Animation suffers by being lumped in with all that.

The coming attractions before Sean the Sheep at my "local" theater included a prequel to Peter Pan called, if you can believe it, Pan; an Alvin and the Chipmunks movie; a dopey-looking animated feature about a polar bear (because, you know, Arctic and Antarctic setting are hot); and something with Will Ferrell in it. And that is what the movie industry thinks will appeal to people who also like Aardman's intelligent and entertaining productions. Has the industry's brains been so rotted by the Disney Channel and Saturday morning cartoons that it thinks animation is for kids?

Back to Shaun the Sheep. The story includes everything I mentioned in this post's title, and the movie's one crappy upbeat pop song is put to clever narrative use twice, once in a barbershop-quartet version much superior to the original. Oh, and did I mention that Shaun the Sheep is, like M. Hulot's Holiday, wordless, though by no means silent, and that its one fart joke is pretty clever? 

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

And another thing about Crimefest

On the eve of Crimefest 2013 (or, if you prefer, on the threshold or the cusp), here's a reminder from one of my previous trips to that festival that there's more than crime to this fest.

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  I've written about my trip to Bristol, England, for CrimeFest 2009. I failed to mention that Bristol is home to Aardman Animations, which means it's also home to those two lovable characters at left.

Unfortunately, though Wallace and Gromit are featured in a promotional poster for Bristol, our guide said Aardman offers no tours. Instead, then, why not hop over and catch the duo at their own Web site?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Wallace, Gromit and a cereal killer

Salient facts about A Matter of Loaf and Death, in which Aardman Animations hops on the Jason Voorhees/Lou Ford/Hannibal Lecter bandwagon and has Wallace and Gromit face down a serial killer:

1) The movie, actually a short film for television, "references" Aliens, Psycho, Batman, and Ghost, according to Wikipedia. Hitchcock lovers might also detect allusions to Blackmail, Foreign Correspondent and Vertigo.

2) Nick Park, Wallace and Gromit's creator, calls A Matter of Loaf and Death "kind of a bread-based murder mystery." Its first murder victim, Baker Bob, is based on co-writer Bob Baker.

3) The "making of" feature included on the DVD (on which Park calls A Matter of Loaf and Death a "who-doughnut") is one of the better examples of its kind, with fascinating detail about how the animators get plasticine faces with no eyebrows and some with no mouths to express such a range of emotions.

4) The term Anglo-Saxon gets bandied about pretty loosely, but Park is one of the few people I know of who has a real Anglo-Saxon name: Wulstan. (It's his middle name, according to various Internet sources.)

5) One of the characters looks like one of my colleagues. No, I won't tell you which character or which colleague.

(Read about Detectives Beyond Borders' visit to Wallace and Gromit's home town here, including a real-life tour guide who would be perfectly at home in a W&G movie.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010