Shaun the Sheep Movie

The sheep from a small English farm, joined by their sheepdog, set out to rescue their farmer from amnesia in the big city. The smash-hit TV cartoon show from quirky Aardman Studios makes the leap to the big screen with surprising ease, considering how well the show's eight-minute TV format fits its farm-animal-life premise—and considering how many of today's crummy animated features seem to be expanded from mediocre ideas for eight-minute cartoons. Writer-directors Mark Burton and Richard Starzak eschew dialogue—the only vocals we hear are chuckles, grunts, mutters and such—with the result that this droll, sweetly hilarious movie plays like the triumphant return of the silent comedy of Buster Keaton. Throughout its modest 85 minutes, the movie never loses its ingenuity or its focus on pure visual comedy. J.L.