Photo: Amazon MGM Studios/Everett Collection
Hugh Jackman takes top billing in The Sheep Detectives as murder victim George Hardy, but the movie’s real leads are its animal characters, which are all members of George’s flock of artfully computer-generated sheep. There’s Sebastian (Bryan Cranston), a brooding Icelandic ram who keeps to himself, and Cloud (Regina Hall), a fluffy Cheviot known for her looks. Sir Ritchfield (Patrick Stewart) is a doughty elder Boreray with majestic horns, but Mopple (Chris O’Dowd), a doofy Merino, turns out to be deceptively wise himself. Then there’s Lily, a tan Shetland voiced with devastating sincerity by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who takes it upon herself to lead an investigation into her beloved owner’s death. Lily is universally acknowledged to be the brainiest member of the group. They aren’t stupid, but they have a generally sheepy outlook and priorities, chief among them keeping themselves as comfortable and unbothered as possible. (In a moment of frustration with her peers, Lily points out that “sheep” are what humans call other humans who can’t think for themselves.) They’re animals that have depended entirely on the care of their loving owner, and because their naïve understanding of the world reflects their limited experiences, they’re more like children.
When Lily dares to venture off the land where she’s spent her entire life, she’s not just confronting a mystery but a larger reality that’s more complicated than she ever imagined. It makes The Sheep Detectives a fascinating movie for kids, but it’s an improbably effective and tear-jerking one for adults as well. The film, which was adapted from Leonie Swann’s novel Three Bags Full by writer Craig Mazin and director Kyle Balda, is technically a cozy mystery set in a stylized English village full of actors who only sometimes speak with English accents, with Nicholas Braun as bumbling local policeman Tim and Nicholas Galitzine as Elliot, the visiting reporter with whom he teams up. Potential suspects in George’s murder include most of the town, including innkeeper Beth (Hong Chau), butcher Ham (Conleth Hill), the reverend (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith), rival shepherd Caleb (Tosin Cole), and George’s long-lost American daughter, Rebecca (Molly Gordon). But the solution takes a back seat to what’s really a coming-of-age story for Lily, who was always able to predict the identity of the murderers in the mystery novels George liked to read to his flock in the evenings, although he never dreamed that they were actually following along. Real life, unfortunately, doesn’t fall along genre tropes, even in the lightly whimsical universe of the film, and what she finds challenges not just her image of other humans but of the owner the sheep trusted and adored.
Corporate pressures and a need to reach the broadest possible audience have smoothed a lot of the sharper edges out of children’s fare. Even Pixar at its boldest tackled tough material in a way that would register with adults while sailing safely over the heads of the youngest viewers. So there’s something startling and worthy of salute about the way The Sheep Detectives runs directly at the topic of death — not just through the scene of George being found dead, but through Lily’s initially mythologized understanding of mortality, as well as what it means to sit with tough emotions. The sheep don’t believe that death is a thing outside of the pages of books. It’s not because they haven’t encountered it, but because, with the exception of Mopple, they have the ability to make themselves forget difficult or unpleasant things. (They’re convinced that sheep eventually turn into clouds.) This willful amnesia allows them to maintain a mind-set of blissful ease, but it also means they simply avoid any upsetting thoughts, whether it’s the death of their shepherd or the news that their new owner might not want to just raise them for wool. In her insistence on remembering, Lily goes through a touching journey into a maturity that means learning to live with grief and with the imperfections of the ones you love.
The Sheep Detectives isn’t on a level with Babe, the talking-animal classic it most strongly evokes; among other things, the mystery just doesn’t unfurl in a way that’s very compelling. But it still has no business being as good as it is, or being the kind of movie you can imagine living forever in young memories as something both lightly scarring and delightful. Credit is due to Balda, who is making his live-action debut after directing the sort of frenetic, frictionless kiddie features, like Minions and Despicable Me 3, that it feels like his new movie indirectly rebukes. He brings an animation veteran’s experience and eye to a project that relies heavily on CG characters. The reason the sheep are capable of conveying emotionally resonant experiences is because there’s a tangibility to them onscreen that’s not just about design but to how well they fit within the movie’s slightly heightened reality — creatures that have rich inner lives but that, to the humans, are basically part of the background. Like children, they pick up much more than anyone expects them to, even if they don’t understand it all in the moment. The best repeated joke that The Sheep Detectives has to offer is that what the human characters take as bleating is actually sometimes scathing commentary on their own behavior, delivered from a ruminant’s eye view.
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