“Innocence” in movies can all too often turn to saccharine sweetness. Three cheers, then, for the good folk at Aardman who have once again toiled long and hard to put delightfully childish smiles on all our faces. Admittedly, they’ve had practice – the Shaun the Sheep TV show has been charming CBBC viewers for years. But this joyous stop-motion adventure is so much more than an expanded television episode; as our farmyard heroes venture off into the “Big City” there is feature-length adventure to match the much-loved domesticity, providing thrills and spills aplenty even while smothering us in cuddles. As always with Aardman, the film-makers conjure a deliriously detailed world, juxtaposing scenes of sublime silent-cinema slapstick (there are no words, merely noises) with fleeting nods to Silence of the Lambs and Cape Fear. In one supremely surreal sequence, our sheepy heroes collectively dress up as a pantomime horse into whose bottom a miscreant’s head gets stuck – just writing that down is making me giggle. With the animators’ thumbprints everywhere in evidence, this is properly tactile fare; I could feel it scrubbing my soul clean like a cinematic pumice stone. It may be winter, but as the feverishly catchy theme song says, it feels like summer with ewe!
• Comments have been reopened to time with this film’s Australian release
