The sequel is certain for Shaun the Sheep

From Bristol to the BBC, to the bigtime – that’s been the journey for Wallace and Gromit spin-off character Shaun the Sheep. So what’s the next big step? A sequel, of course.

Following on from this year’s hugely successful Shaun the Sheep The Movie, Aardman and StudioCanal will once again team up to bring us some further adventures of the woolly one whom we first saw on screen nearly twenty years ago.

And why not? His first big-screen outing recently topped the $100m-mark worldwide, including UK takings of $21m and a not-too-shabby $18m over in America. No less than 70 countries have had the privilege of witnessing his antics since February’s grand opening.

Back in May we reported that Aardman and StudioCanal will collaborate to make prehistoric animation Early Man. Canal’s chairman Oliver Courson was more than a little excited then and was quick to heap praise again: “I’m very pleased to see that, as for ‘Shaun the Sheep’, you can be distinctive, take risks, be aggressively ambitious and wish for quality and, at the same time, have a good B.O. result, and be mainstream.”

As the first film took an entire three years to complete, we’re not expecting a possible release date anytime soon. However, the mere fact that a follow-up is well and truly in the offing is real progress when you consider that it was a mere pipedream a little over six months ago. Back then, co-writer and director Richard Starzak said that “we have to think about a sequel, just in case. hopefully there will be one.”

It is expected that the dialogue will continue to consist entirely of “baas”, of which there were 1,589 in the first instalment.