There’s a great throughline in Aardman Animations’ 2012 film, The Pirates! Band of Misfits, about how it doesn’t really matter if you’re the best or most successful at what you do so long as you’re able to make a living doing what you love. It’s a philosophy the British studio behind Wallace & Gromit seems to have taken to heart, despite the continously diminishing returns on their movies at the global box office since they started making features in 2000 with Chicken Run. You can see why Aardman, with their simple stories and rudimentary character designs, would have a hard time standing out next to the more intricate narratives and realistic digital animation of recent Disney and Pixar films. And yet, it’s that very combination of simplicity in plotting and stylization that makes A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon such a joy to watch.

The Shaun the Sheep Movie sequel finds Shaun (voiced by Justin Fletcher), per usual, causing headaches left and right for Mossy Bottom Farm’s orderly sheep dog, Bitzer (John Sparkes), when he crosses paths with Lu-La (Amalia Vitale), a diminutive, pizza-munching alien with extraterrestrial powers who shares his love for getting into trouble. But with the Ministry of Alien Detection, or MAD, and their leader, Agent Red (Kate Harbour), hot on their tail, the pair must work together to reunite Lu-La with her ship and get her home before she’s captured. Meanwhile, hoping to take advantage of the recent UFO sightings and make enough money to purchase a spinffy new harvester, the Mossy Bottom Farmer (also Sparkes) recruits his many barn-animals to help him build an alien-based theme park called “Farmageddon”.

It’s a testment to Aardman’s skill that it’s easy to forget Farmageddon, like the first Shaun the Sheep film, succeeds in telling a story clearly without dialogue (assuming animal noises and gibberish don’t count). Writers Jon Brown and Mark Burton, drawing from an idea credited to Richard Starzak, have basically assembled a plot out of elements borrowed from E.T. and the 2011 Simon Pegg/Nick Frost comedy Paul, so the sequel isn’t quite as free-wheeling as the first movie, narrative-wise. Even so, they manage to bring out some unexpected depth in Shaun by making Lu-La - who’s an adorable addition to the loveable miscreants of Mossy Bottom Farm - a child, forcing Shaun to act like the responsible party for once. (Well, as responsible as Shaun can be.) Combined with the surprisingly tender backstory for Agent Red and a good-natured representation of fan culture (UFO obsessives, in this case), this allows the sequel to carry-over the first Shaun the Sheep Movie’s general feeling of innocence and fun, yet infuse it with a tad more structure.

Of course, it wouldn’t be an Aardman film if A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon wasn’t a virtual non-stop parade of delightful visual gags and funny homages. Everything from E.T. to 2001, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and, in one of the movie’s most ingenious bits, Alien’s chest-burster scene gets a clever shout-out in ways there are entertaining whether you grasp the reference or not. The studio’s stop-motion animation has never been quite as sophisticated in its audioscape either, capturing the sound of every scampering hoof and whirling frisbee that crosses the screen (though, admittedly, the soundtrack’s original pop songs feel a little tacked-on). Directors Will Becher and Richard Phelan even find room for one-off jokes - like having MAD’s employees (and their pets) wear hazmat suits 24/7 or a marvelous payoff in the shape of a china shop pun - without allowing the film’s pace to lag.

The eponymous character has now starred in a pair of feature films and a TV series since his introduction in Aardman’s Oscar-winning Wallace & Gromit short, “A Close Shave”, but has yet to lose any of his charm. If anything, Farmageddon further cements Shaun’s status as a fitting successor to the clown princes of silent cinema and their ability to create humor and pathos out of the most basic scenarios (in this case, a lost alien story). It’s also a nice way for the studio to bounce back following the relative disappointment of their last movie, 2018’s prehistoric sports comedy Early Man, without sacrificing any of the qualities that continue to make their work so unique in the modern world of animation. Hopefully, by streaming right onto Netflix, the latest Shaun the Sheep Movie will have an easier time attracting the audience it deserves domestically than it might’ve done otherwise.

A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon is now streaming on Netflix. It is 86 minutes long and is rated G.