After embracing sci-fi shenanigans in Farmageddon, Aardman pivoted to Halloween hijinks for Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom. The premise finds the clumsy Farmer (John Sparkes) trashing the Flock’s beloved pumpkin patch, forcing Shaun (Justin Fletcher) to play mad scientist to fix the problem with a fast-growing elixir, which spirals out of control, including the creation of a Big Foot-like hairy monster.

This created a whole new set of stop-motion challenges and opportunities for first-time feature directors Steve Cox (Shaun the Sheep: The Flight Before Christmas) and Matthew Walker (Lloyd of the Flies).

“We looked at everything across the board,” said Cox. “We started off with Hammer horror and Universal monsters, but then we soon used everything that we knew from when we grew up in the ’80s as reference: B-movie slasher films, popcorn films. We wanted our Halloween film to not be specific. Tonally, we were going for more of a B-movie adventure feel.”

But there were obviously certain tropes that they wanted to include, such as the mad scientist creating the monster in a lab, the Halloween store, the villagers chasing after the monster, and a lighning storm at the end of the movie. “All of these tropes that we could feed into the story and find the comedy version of it with Shaun and the other characters was a really exciting process,” added Walker.

The introduction of a female vet (Nina Sosanya), who has a budding romance with Farmer, serves a multi-layered character function. “We liked the idea of her kind of becoming sort of an unwitting antagonist in the film, where she obviously doesn’t realise the truth behind this monster,” Cox suggested.

The biggest challenge, of course, was the handling of so much fur for the monster and having it fit within the Shaunworld. “We were happy to have a little bit of boil in our character because the Shaun [puppets] are so tacticle and you get a bit of boil on the fleece of the flock,” Cox explained.

“And we were happy to have a little more twitchiness going on in the animation. And because the story is about hair growth, we have those great scenes where it’s actually growing out and twitching. It feels almost like it’s a character in itself, the way it’s slightly alive.”

But it was much easier to control than expected with the puppet team building various versions of the puppet (which was 18 feet tall) and tinkering with animation tests before figuring out what worked and what didn’t. “So it was a long process before we ended up with the final puppet,” Walker said. “Ultimately there were nine puppets made of the monster. One thing they did was there’s various points on the puppet where they had these key tools that they could slot into areas. For example, in the back of the head, they could manipulate it without having to touch the hair. And that was similar for points on the back and on the arms.”

This allowed the animators to put the puppet into complicated poses while minimizing how much they needed to touch the hair, which would’ve been visible in the final animation. “There’s lots of gears inside there as well,” Cox added. “There’s a control that you can plug in and twist, which lifts the whole top of the head, so the whole top part can move up and down quite easily.”

Then there’s the lab set, art directed by Andy Brown and Kitty Clay. They wanted it to be very dense and colorful with everythintg made from objects that Shaun’s found on the rubbish pile in the dump. This includes the car dashboard that’s used to channel the electricity into the potion. Meanwhile, the animated electricity bolts were all hand-animated in 2D.

“But it was a real challenge to light the set because there’s so many colors and flashing lights, and also just figuring out where the characters are on that set” Cox said. “A lot of the flass work in the lab, the little flasks, the test tubes, and those spirally tubes, were all hand-blown by glass blowers. We also had someone experimenting with different liquids, putting glow-in-the-dark gel into these liquids so that we could do two passes of the liquid in the jars.

“It would look clear when we have it in the normal lighting” Cox continued, “but we could also then turn on a  fluorescent light and it would glow in the dark, and then we’d use that to make the liquid glow by changing the lighting rather than swapping out the prop. There was real craft going on to make these things.”