Things were looking up for ~

今年の干支である羊（あくまで日本での話ですが）をモチーフにした人気アニメ「ひつじのショーン」。このショーンは元々クレイアニメ「ウォレスとグルミット」の一キャラクターに過ぎませんでした。アニメ番組の脇役からいかにショーンがスターダムに登りつめたのかについて書かれたTelegraphの記事からの引用です。
look upには「［通例進行形で］（物価・景気などが）上向きになる，よくなる」という意味があります（『スーパー・アンカー英和辞典』第4版，学研教育出版）。同辞書にはThings are [Business is] looking up.（情勢は好転しつつある［商売は上向いてきている］）という用例が挙げられていました。以上からここでは「ショーンにとって有利な条件が揃っていた」と解釈できます。（Koyamamoto）

How Shaun the Sheep became a global phenomenon: behind the scenes at Aardman
Twenty years after his screen debut supporting Wallace and Gromit, Shaun the Sheep has eclipsed the illustrious duo to truly stand apart from the flock. On the release of his first film, the Telegraph charts the rise of a model megastar.
For a screen debut by a complete unknown, it went rather well. Shaun the Sheep, a new animated character devised by Nick Park for Aardman, was first seen in the Wallace and Gromit film A Close Shave. His was a small role in terms of screen time, though he was crucial to the plot: Gromit had been wrongly imprisoned for sheep-rustling, and Shaun, using an angle grinder to cut the bars of his cell, sprung him from jail.
A Close Shave was first broadcast on Christmas Eve in 1995, attracting BBC Two’s largest audience of that entire year, and went on to win an Oscar.
Shaun had even received a namecheck in the film: the hapless Wallace, giving voice to Aardman’s corporate weakness for groan-inducing puns, announces to Gromit, ‘I think we’ll call him Shaun!’ (Shaun, shorn, get it?) As Park tells it, ‘Everyone at Aardman liked him. He was very much an innocent victim, cute and lovable, with his little crop-top hairstyle, big eyes and simple face.’ Things were looking up for Shaun.
Yet this promising start ushered in 12 years of anticlimax. After A Close Shave, Shaun’s image appeared in Aardman commercials, books and on greeting cards, but he was never used prominently. A company employee tells me discreetly, in tones one would have to call sheepish, ‘I don’t think we quite knew what to do with him.’ If Shaun could speak (crucially, he doesn’t and can’t, of which more later) he might express resentment at this perceived injustice.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/11365274/shaun-the-sheep-movie-aardman-behind-the-scenes.html