Shaun the Sheep

There is a lot of great animation being released this summer. "Minions" is both witty and spectacular in IMAX 3D, and "Inside Out" is so well written and moving, with smart voice acting and powerful human insight, it makes the live action blockbusters pale in comparison.

"Shaun the Sheep" is not in the same league. This is a very low comedy, full of family-friendly physical humor and not afraid to be a little rude. (Honestly, farting and feces are just a fundamental part of life on a farm.) But this almost nostalgic, throwback film from the creators of "Wallace and Gromit" has something that none of the others can claim: Meticulously detailed, handcrafted artistry.

Produced by Aardman Animations and based on the television series, "Shaun the Sheep" premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and was released in the UK this February. The character of Shaun first appeared in "Wallace and Gromit" before he got his own series and now in this feature written and directed by Richard Starzak and Mark Burton.

Shaun and his herd of friends live on the beautifully bucolic Mossy Bottom Farm in English countryside with a hardworking (and nicely dopey) farmer and his ever-faithful dog Bitzer. (Though all of the effigies are instantly recognizable, Bitzer is particularly evocative of Gromit.)

Life has become pretty routine and the sheep long for something more. Nothing fancy; they just want to have a little party where they can watch a DVD and eat a toaster-baked pizza in the farmer's living room.

In order to get into the main house, the farm animals lull the farmer to sleep and shut him up in a trailer. But Bitzer soon discovers the herd's machinations and puts an end to the menagerie in the parlor.

Nevertheless, when the dog attempts to rouse the sleeping farmer, he accidentally sets off a series of events that sends the farmer into the big city in a runaway trailer, where he receives a blow to the head, is hospitalized and diagnosed with amnesia.

Without the farmer a normal life in Mossy Bottom proves impossible, so Shaun and his friends set out on one of the wildest adventures of their wooly little lives.

This is maybe the only kind of film where you can literally see the fingerprints of the artists on the screen. You see many fingerprints pressed into inanimate clay sculptures, while unseen filmmakers manipulate them over time to make them look like they're moving.

In a world where even live action films have a good deal of their pixels imagined within a processor, "Shaun the Sheep" is an honest-to-God stop motion masterpiece -- the figures are built from actual and absolutely tactile pieces of clay, the smallest arm movement is made from hundreds of individually crafted frames of photography. (It's particularly interesting to note that within the pupils of the characters eyes you can see a pinhole where a tool is inserted to allow animators to move each orb a fraction of an inch, frame by frame, and thereby give us a completely mobile facial expression.)

While young audience members giggle at the farm animal's funnies, a connoisseur can appreciate the truly artisanal filmmaking.

Most animated films make a juvenile subject appeal to adults with verbal allusions and inside jokes that a child simply won't understand, but this film realizes that when it comes to slapstick, there isn't much of a distinction between adults and children. Here, our funny bones are pretty universal.