Shaun the Sheep: The Flight Before Christmas wasn’t easy to make

If there’s one more Christmas special that can fill up your time in the week between the holiday and New Year’s, it should be Aardman Animation’s Shaun the Sheep: The Flight Before Christmas.

Image courtesy of Netflix

Netflix’s charming and heartwarming 30-minute special features the story of a busy family of farmers-influencers and their child, who find themselves among Shaun and all his sheep flock in unlikely circumstances.

Although the story is nearly non-existent, it allows you to enjoy one stunning stop motion gag after another. Aardman’s charms are evident in this video, which features YouTube tutorials as well as robot vacuums and sheep snowmen. Variety’s latest piece shows just how long it takes for holiday magic to be created.

Image courtesy of Netflix

This is the making of this storyFly before Christmas In 2018, the series was launched. Before the Christmas special idea was approved, producers were already discussing the possibility of Shaun the Sheep specials in the future. By 2020, it seemed like everything was moving smoothly, as had been the case for 2015’s Christmas special, The Farmer’s Llamas, The 2018 film, Farmageddon.

Producer Richard Beek told Variety that “everything was going great guns; we’d got the script into such a great place; really, really solid. It was received well internally. It was well received by our production partners. So we felt like we’d used that six months really, really well. And we’re all ready to start [story] boarding … then COVID hit.”

That necessitated an eight-week shutdown at Aardman’s studio, with remote work filling in for storyboard and animatics. By the end of 2020, storyboarding became a “full-on process,” Beek said, with the limitations of COVID-19 narrowing the team’s focus.

The plot of Shaun the Sheep This series revolves around a sheep that lives on a small British farm. The 170 episodes were first aired in 2007. They are filled with hilarious mishaps. Shaun is very clever, his Farmer is very foolish, and the Farmer’s sheepdog, Bitzer, often finds himself in more trouble than the sheep as he tries to corral them. It’s all very wholesome and silly.

Aardman provided The Farmer with two rivals, Jin and Ben from the influencer-farmer clan of Jin and Ella in 2020. But even if the farmer is at odds with the internet-famous couple, they certainly aren’t the villains of the series — that’s far too dastardly for Shaun the Sheep.

Image courtesy of Netflix

Image courtesy of Netflix

“We were very clear that the film didn’t have villains. So we have people who are causing problems for Shaun, but the family couldn’t be the bad guys,” Beek said. Ben and Jin have different levels of carelessness than the Farmer. In The Flight Before Christmas Ella requests her dad to read her a story at bedtime. Instead of reading the book, he shows her video. While their lives might be more peaceful than those of the Farmer and they are likely to lack his warmth, it is possible that their lives will still feel more like home.

It’s a warmth Ella is missing, and that she finds in the adorable form of Timmy the Sheep over the course of the new special.

It’s all very sweet and quite a bit different than Aardman’s most well-known work, Wallace & Gromit. Also, it required the creation of several characters. This is a tedious process. Ella was initially drawn in two dimensions. Claire Cohen designed the metal skeleton. All of her clothing and wild hair were chosen for her character.

That’s a tricky part of anything animated: every detail has to be thought through and added in hopes of creating a greater world. That goes double for Ben’s house. Director Steve Cox told Variety that the “art director, Andy Brown, was asking: ‘What kind of curtains do you want in here?’ and I said we need them to be ceiling to floor,” before finding the right solution in a car advertisement.

When Aardman finally got to shooting, it took six “furious” months starting in January 2021, Beek said. “It’s not as considered as some of the other work we do. But that’s part of its energy.”

It’s the type of work that can only be done with an experienced team. “All the things that are economies about ShaunThey are part of the reason it is so special. Shaun. It would make us overthink, Shaun, and to start rehearsing all the shots, maybe it would lose its spontaneity and energy,” Beek said.

You can see all that spontaneity in the display. Shaun the Sheep – The Flight Before ChristmasYou can stream the movie on Netflix.