In an interview with Nexus Point News, co-directors Steve Cox and Matthew Walker discussed what the original plans for Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom were, how long it took to shoot the movie, and went into detail on what the hardest scene to shoot was and their wishlist Aardman crossovers.

I was able to attend the Annecy Animation Festival earlier this year, and I attended the Aardman panel, and it was my first ever panel at Annecy. To really see what goes on behind the craft at Aardman and to get a peek at your movie, Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom, it was sensational. I just want to thank you and everyone at Aardman for what they do and for allowing people to also step into the craftsmanship as well.

Steve Cox and Matthew Walker: Thank you!

Steve Cox: We were in the thick of production when it was Annecy, so we weren’t able to make it ourselves, but we were right in the middle of shooting at that stage.

I’ve now seen the full film, and you’ve both done a phenomenal job. To celebrate that 50th, I wanted to ask what other Aardman property would you ahve crossover with Shaun the Sheep, excluding Wallace and Gromit?

Matthew Walker: I’d love to see Rex the Runt come back, so if we can do a Rex the Runt and Shaun the Sheep crossover, that’d be great.

How does it feel not only working on but also releasing a Shaun the Sheep movie in Aardman’s 50th year, and was that something that popped up in discussion during production?

Steve Cox: Well, it’s a big thing to release a Shaun movie, and we’re always making Shaun shows. We’re doing Shaun series as often as we can, and we occasionally do a half-hour special. It just came about the right time to make a movie, and it wasn’t intended to be released on the 50th year of Aardman. It just organically happened that way. It felt like the right time to get something back on the big screen for Shaun, as this idea started off as a half hour, but we soon realised that it needed to be shown on the big screen. It was a bigger story than a TV show. We wanted to get it back out into the cinemas.

Matthew Walker: It’s also really exciting that it’s going to be on the big screen, in cinemas all over the world, rather than straight to streaming or television, so that’s been really exciting.

Steve Cox: The fact that it’s Aardman’s 50th year just adds to it, really. The fact that we can release a film and other things during this year.

I am glad to see that. I think one thing I can confidently say about Aardman is that they do stick to tradition. Last year, we had the Wallace and Gromit movie that came out on Christmas Day on TV for people to watch, and now a new Shaun the Sheep is still coming out in cinemas in an age where a lot of films are just coming out on streaming.

You pointed out in your answer that this was a short turned into a feature film. How does the work transition into that feature film mindset?

Steve Cox: When we were working on it, it just felt like too much good stuff that we could put into half an hour, and it felt like an injustice not to stretch it out to a feature-length movie and get it back on the big screen.

Matthew Walker: I think it was early on when they decided to make a Halloween Shaun film, and that’s when the ideas really started flowing and the ideas started to expand. It started potentially as a half-hour special, but as the story developed, I think that at one point it became a 45-minute special, and then we asked, “If we had to make this an hour or two-parter?” At that point, if we’ve got that much story, we might as well make it a feature film.

I’m glad to see it as a feature film, and I can’t wait for people to see it. You brought up that it is a Halloween movie. What inspired that theme for The Beast of Mossy Bottom?

Matthew Walker: It was very early on. The original idea when it was still a potential special was a Valentine’s Day special, and so that relationship with the Farmer or the Farmer having a romantic relationship with someone was always there in the story. I think at some point there became the idea of this monster and a Halloween idea, and then those ideas kind of got combined to become the story that we’re telling in this film.

It was really exciting to do a new genre for Shaun. With the movies, each one’s been a great opportunity to do something new with Shaun. In the first movie, we took him off the farm and took him to a big city. The second movie became more of a sci-fi film, going into space. It felt like a natural progression to do a Halloween movie and play around with the tropes of horror but in a family-friendly way where it’s more about the laughs than the scares. That was really exciting when we started developing that idea.

Steve Cox: It’s such a rich world as well. The world of a Halloween movie with horror tropes and jump scares and all the richness, the visual richness that comes with Halloween. It just felt really exciting with that playground to kind of dig our teeth into and create a film from.

Stop motion is such an impressive animation technique, and it takes a lot of time. How long did it take to fully animate this movie, and which scene in particular took the longest?

Steve Cox: It was about 10 months in shooting, which is really quick for a stop-motion film. It was the fastest we’ve ever shot a movie here at Aardman. That’s largely down to the way we worked and the experience that the crew have in order to get that film done in such a short amount of time.

Matthew Walker: Because it’s Shaun the Sheep, we’ve done seven series now and the two features and previous specials; we have a whole library of puppets and sets that can be repurposed. There’s a lot of recycling on Shaun the Sheep, which allows us to work quicker because we’re not building everything from scratch. Obviously, there’s new stuff in this film. We have the windmill set, which is an amazing new set, and the docks and the big ship. Those were the sequences that were the ones we kind of knew would be a challenge but were excited about doing and reenacting.

I think for me, the ending with the lightning storm around the windmill felt like a really sort of quite different for Shaun but also very sort of ingrained in the horror genre. There were so many of these ideas that came to us when we were developing the story and going in the Halloween direction. We ended up with too many ideas and too much ambition. It was then about deciding what ambitions canw e achieve, which of these do we want to put in the film, and sort of narrowing it down to the key story beats and set pieces that we wanted to do in a way that we could achieve given their limitations.

Steve Cox: One of the sequences that jumped to mind that took a while to shoot was the Thriller dance at the beginning, where you have all the sheep coming out of the barn and dancing in unison. Anything with multiple characters and a dance routine is always a tricky thing to shoot.

Matthew Walker: Especially when those characters are very close together, we had to shoot multiple passes of that shot. We had the background characters animated as one pass and then the characters in front and then Shaun at the front, so it’s multiple passes of that shot, and then we put it all together afterwards. It’s a big challenge for the animator.

Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom is out now in cinemas.