Monday, March 28, 2011

One Giant Leap for Lambkind


One Giant Leap for Lambkind
[DVD j Shaun]

From the animation wizards who brought us Wallace & Gromit, here are Shaun the Sheep and his many barnyard friends and foes. This DVD contains 6 of the 40 first-season episodes of this British stop-motion animated series. Each episode is about 7 minutes long, and features absolutely no dialog, although plenty of baas and other animal sounds. Shaun has human level intelligence, and is very crafty...which comes in handy for getting himself and his friends both in and out of trouble. Bitzer is the farmer's loyal sheepdog, but he's as much a friend to the sheep as a foe. In this particular collection, in which the episodes are aired completely out of order, two of the six stories feature visits from adorable meddling aliens. The humor is all very slapstick, and resembles that of silent film comedies of the 1930s. And the animation is fresh, unlikely most of the computer and/or hand-drawn animation common to today's televised cartoons. The only negative about this DVD is that the producers have chosen to convert the original widescreen British version to a pan-and-scan version on the US edition -- In several of the cartoons, it is very obvious that part of the image has been cut off. Still...incredibly entertaining. Aimed at kids, but the adults will definitely appreciate it as well. I hope the libraries will get more in this series! -- recommended by Scott C. - Bennett Martin Public Library

[ Internet Movie Database entry for this series ] | [ official Shaun the Sheep web site ]

Have you seen this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide web site. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide blog individually over the course of the entire month.

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