The only fitting comparison for this deranged Estonian stop-motion animation is if Shaun the Sheep had somehow been infected with a terminal case of BSE. The human characters are ugly lumpen golems, all the better to suggest rural backwardness; milk enjoys the same almost-ontological status here as Malkovichness in Being John Malkovich; the film has an unhealthy anal fixation that at one point expresses itself in a giant bear, irritated by a heavy-metal guitarist in his colon, who farts out an entire forestful of animals. In short, it’s brilliant.
City brats Priidik (voiced by co-director Mikk Mägi), Aino (co-director Oskar Lehemaa) and Mart (Mägi) are sent to stay with their grandfather (Mägi), who to their scorn is always doing “barn things”. The old fella prides himself on his way with an udder; he starts to rid them of their urban prissiness with a few squirts of yoghurty lactate. But when his prize cow escapes, one-time milking champion Old Milker (Jan Uuspõld) turns up to alert them of the danger: relieve that udder within 24 hours, or risk unleashing “lactopalypse”.
Mägi and Lehemaa’s film, a continuation of a web series, boils down in the end to a conventional action-movie showdown – but in every other respect it is a deeply weird smackdown of ribald cynicism and grotesquerie. There’s an interlude, when the family stumbles on a hippy festival in the woods, when satire briefly descends: about the gulf between nature-loving outsiders and real countryfolk. But this almost seems sensible compared to the rest, from granpops waking up on his own funeral pyre, to the ursine rectum extravaganza, to them being asked to pleasure an ancient tree spirit by driving their tractor in and out of its stump.
Without quite matching the millimetric planning of Aardman’s efforts, it has just as much energy and double the WTF quotient. Old Milker is a particularly horrible creation, transformed by his own brush with lactopalypse into a kind of milk-sweating lich, hellbent on decapitating the poor moo with a chainsaw. It adds up to pure glorious nonsense, but Mägi and Lehemaa should probably lay off the full fat for a while.
• The Old Man Movie: Lactopalypse! is released in cinemas on 2 June.
