SECOND SCREEN
Shaun The Sheep: The Movie Cert: G 1hr 25mins Selma Cert: 12A 2hrs 8mins
I missed Shaun the Sheep’s debut appearance in the 1995 Wallace and Gromit short A Close Shave, and by the time he got his own TV series in 2007 it was too late for me and my children too. But with the inevitable Shaun The
Sheep: The Movie arriving in cinemas, I’ve caught up now and, slightly to my surprise, definitely begun to see what all the fuss is about. The story is admirably simple – Shaun and his fleecy friends fancy a break from their normal bucolic routine down on Mossy Bottom Farm, so with great ingenuity they send the farmer to sleep (the sleep-inducing effect of counting sheep is a running joke), put him in an old caravan and retire to the farmhouse for cocktails and telly.
But the caravan breaks loose and rolls all the way into the Big City, leaving the farmer in hospital, Bitzer the sheepdog in hot pursuit, and Shaun and his flock with an awful lot of sorting out to do.
The jokes come thick, fast and splendidly silly; the fine detail in Aardman Animation’s hallmark stopmotion animation is simply stunning; and the characterisation – especially for a film where there is low-level muttering but no real dialogue – is quite superb. It’s a glorious treat from beginning to end.
Selma is almost the last of the Oscar contenders to arrive but it comes mired in the most controversy. Has it been snubbed by the Academy, from which it has only two nominations (Best Picture and Best Song), fuelling suggestions that its star, David Oyelowo, and its director, Ava DuVernay have been overlooked?
Oyelowo’s performance as civil rights leader Martin Luther King suffers from the same problem Idris Elba ran into playing Nelson Mandela in The Long Walk To
Freedom. Portraying such a famous figure makes it hard for audiences to work out where impersonation ends and performance begins. Oyelowo is further hampered by a screenplay that gives us a King as declamatory in private as he is in public.
It’s a powerful and, at times, violent story, but that doesn’t automatically make
Selma a powerful and important film. It’s a pretty good one but you can’t help wondering how Spike Lee or Steve McQueen might have gone about it.