Every Shaun the Sheep Movie, In Order

Released in 1995 and lasting just 30 minutes, you could argue that A Close Shave, Wallace and Gromit’s third stop-motion outing, doesn’t really count as a movie — it only won the Oscar for Best Animated Short, after all — but I’d argue that there’s more comedy, drama, and suspense in this Aardman masterpiece than most feature length movies manage in their entire run-times. 

This is also, more importantly, the first Wallace & Gromit joint to feature an appearance from our main lamb: Shaun is introduced as the most prominent member of a flock who become the targets of a sheep rustling operation run by a robotic dog named Preston, whose unsuspecting owner, Wendolene, happens to have a crush on Wallace — which I'm happy to report is very mutual. 

Along with all those delightful storylines, and like all the best Aardman movies, A Close Shave is full of references to classic cinema — from as far flung places as Brief Encounter and Terminator 2. As always, it’s free to watch on BBC iPlayer and I can’t recommend it enough.

Almost two decades on from his first screen appearance in A Close Shave, and after four seasons of his beloved CBBC TV show, Shaun finally got to have his first standalone big screen outing in the appropriately titled Shaun the Sheep Movie.

This air tight, 85-minute romp sees Shaun and his flock go on an adventure into the city, where Shaun ends up in an animal control lock up and has to find a way to break out. Meanwhile, Shaun’s farmer hits his head and gets amnesia, which leads to him becoming a viral sensation after cutting (or rather, shearing) a local celebrity’s hair.

It’s all very fun and gentle and comforting, with nothing quite as scary (for younger viewers in particular) as Preston or Feathers McGraw from those earlier Wallace & Gromit movies. It also took Shaun back to the Oscars for the second time, where he lost out on Best Animated Feature to Pixar’s Inside Out — which, as he would likely agree, is nothing to be ashamed of.

The first sci-fi flick in the Shaun the Sheep “Eweniverse” is 2019’s perfectly titled Farmageddon — a movie about an alien who crash lands near Mossy Bottom, and who Shaun and his flock must help to get home before its captured by a nefarious, anti-alien, government organization called MAD.

As that plot might suggest, there are no shortage of nods to Steven Spielberg classics like Close Encounters and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial here, but there are some subtler reference to movies like Signs and Arrival that slightly more discerning sci-fi fans will have a blast picking out.

Again, for the third time in Shaun's glittering career, the movie was recognised by the Academy with a nomination for Best Animated Feature — where it eventually lost out to Pixar’s Soul.

After paying homage to classic prison break and science fiction movies in his first two outing, Shaun can now claim to have tackled the horror genre with The Beast of Mossy Bottom — another stone cold triumph for our furry friend and the stop motion wizards at Aardman.

This third standalone feature sees Shaun attempt to track down a so-called “Beast” that’s been frightening the local people and animals of Mossy Bottom — a hunt which leads him into a number of creepy situations where not everything is quite as it seems. 

Like Farmageddon, this is a movie packed to the gills with references and Easter eggs for horror fans to gobble up — especially any viewers with a soft spot for the old school classics of the genre like Frankenstein. No word yet on whether this one will make it four Oscar appearances in a row for Shaun, but at this stage you’d be a bit of a woolly to rule him out.