Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom

Shaun first appeared in Nick Park's Wallace & Gromit short A Close Shave in 1995 and has carried his own television series since 2007. The Beast of Mossy Bottom is Aardman's third Shaun feature, after Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015) and A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon (2019), both nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. It opened in UK cinemas on 18 September 2026 as a Sky Original, with GKIDS distributing in North America and Studiocanal handling international sales.

On Halloween Eve the Farmer blunders through the flock's secret pumpkin patch, and Shaun tries to put things right with some home-brewed science; before long, talk of a wild beast in the woods has the town in uproar. As in the earlier films, the comedy runs on bleats, grunts and slapstick rather than dialogue, with Justin Fletcher voicing Shaun and Timmy and John Sparkes the Farmer and Bitzer, joined by Nina Sosanya as the Vet, Andy Nyman and Paul Whitehouse. Long-time Aardman collaborators Steve Cox and Matthew Walker make their feature directing debut from a script by Mark Burton and Giles Pilbrow, and Natalie Holt, the composer of Loki, writes her first score for an animated feature.

Reviews have been close to unanimous: the film holds 99 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes from more than 85 critics, with a Metacritic score of 80. Its pleasures are the house specialities: handmade stop-motion sets dense with background gags, a farmyard ensemble that needs no words, and a mild Halloween spookiness pitched at younger viewers without boring the adults beside them. Alongside Chicken Run and Vengeance Most Fowl, it shows the studio's handmade comedy has lost none of its precision.