An Adventure of Sheep and Chicken is a web animation launched in October 2017 by the YouTuber ILEM World.
The story (divided into six parts) follows Sheep and Chicken, a sheep and a chicken respectively, who head into the forest upon the will of Sheep. Also in this forest is a lost, hungry hiker. At the end of the first part, the hiker discovers Chicken and plans off-screen to kill him for food. Sheep and Chicken have a minor dispute over the world and getting lost, whereupon Chicken tells Sheep that he met the hiker. The hiker appears to have gone, but then is revealed to have shrinking powers.
The rest of the story follows Sheep trying to save Chicken from the hiker. The video can be seen here.
An Adventure of Sheep and Chicken provides examples of:
- Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: The main characters are a red sheep and a blue chicken.
- Anti-Villain: The hiker, who has sunk to killing a sentient creature (Chicken) out of hunger, and later decides to help save Chicken’s friend, Sheep.
- Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Sheep's excuse to leave the forest is that he (rightfully) doesn't feel safe with hikers around, and there's no good grass to eat.
- Big Bad: The Hiker, for the first half of the video.
- Cliffhanger: The story never tells the viewer what happens to Sheep and Chicken after they arrive at the farm. The cliffhanger is solved by a comic here: https://ilemworld.weebly.com/sheep-and-chicken.html
- There is also a mini one at the end of Part Two
- Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: All blue characters and red characters have dialogue in their respective colours.
- Contrived Coincidence: Sheep being too slow to catch the hiker.Sheep: I'll catch you... if I could run!
- A Dog Named "Dog": Well, a sheep named Sheep and a chicken named Chicken.
- Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The Hiker is only referred to as 'a hiker' or 'the hiker'. His real name is never revealed.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: It’s about a sheep named Sheep and a chicken named Chicken going on an adventure.
- The Faceless: Because the characters look like 2-D paper cut-outs, no one in the video has a face except Chicken, whose face is revealed at 4:06.
- Foreshadowing: It is mentioned in the middle of the second part that the hiker has the power to shrink things at will. At the end of the same part, the hiker shrinks Chicken and steals him.
- Good All Along: The hiker only wanted to capture Chicken because he was hungry. After realizing he wouldn't be able to catch anything after losing Chicken, he ends up helping Sheep.
- Minimalist Cast: There are only three main characters in the entire video. In fact, there are no more than three people in any scene in the video.
- Non-Protagonist Resolver: The protagonists of the story are Sheep and Chicken, but the heroes who save the day are really the hiker and a helicopter crew. The hiker sets a forest fire to get the attention of firefighters to save Sheep, and a few helicopter pilots save both Sheep and Chicken.
- Noodle Incident: The whole reason why Chicken doesn't want to go to his home farm is never explained.
- Parody: A Journey of Shep and Chiken(AJOSAC) created by ILEM Universe. AJOSAC's first episode parodies the original video. Every word of dialogue is spelt incorrectly, and the video itself is sped up to 36 seconds. The second episode, which is much better, doesn't explain what happened to Sheep and Chicken between Episode One and Episode Two.
