Alex Wheeler Movie Ops

Many of us weren’t expecting much from The Sheep Detectives. After all, it was a movie about sheep. Being detectives. Surely it was going to be a frivolous kids’ movie, and the adults taking them would be happy if it didn’t bore them to death. Those who had read the book on which it’s based, Three Bags Full, were probably laughing at us. They knew that the story captured magic. All the film had to do was recapture it.

And recapture it did, because this is one of the great surprises of the year. It is a kids’ movie, sure. It doesn’t get too deep, its mystery isn’t too complex, and it doesn’t take itself too seriously. However, it strikes a tone that is somewhere between cozy, charming, funny, broad, and sneakily impactful. You may not realize it as The Sheep Detectives leads you down its gentle path, but it’s doing a lot.

The story kicks off with Hugh Jackman’s George writing a letter about his sheep. He describes each individually, giving us some seamless exposition, while waxing poetic about a life spent in their company. He sends this letter off and abruptly dies, collapsing just outside his trailer so his sheep sees his body. When local police officer Tim (Nicholas Braun) misses all the signs of foul play, George’s smartest sheep, Lily (voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) takes the case. Her sidekick is Mopple (voiced by Chris O’Dowd), a sheep who lacks the ability to forget, and the pair are egged on by Sebastian (voiced by Bryan Cranston), the loner of the herd. 

The story almost doesn’t take off because Lily and the rest of the herd consider forgetting George instead of solving his murder. Sheep have the ability to do this, decide to forget, and they whip it out whenever something painful happens. Except Mopple, who lacks the ability and hence carries much more pain than everyone around him. The gentleness with which he navigates this, constantly deciding whether to let them have their ignorance or push them to endure something painful but meaningful, is the heart of the film. The mystery of who killed George gives the film a propulsive plot, but learning how to live with his death is the real solution Lily and the rest of the herd must figure out. And that’s where it threads the needle of a kid’s movie that is just as satisfying for adults; that’s a hard lesson, one everyone must learn, and Sheep Detectives doesn’t pretend there’s a perfect solution.

Making such a difficult topic fun is the film’s well-balanced sense of humor, which leans on slapstick, satire, and wordplay. There’s sheep humor, of course, playing up the animal’s reputation for not being particularly bright. Outside of the main trio, the herd bumbles around, yelling out unnecessary or incorrect observations vehemently and generally being in the way. Mopple and Lily have their own slip-ups as well, making mountains out of molehills as they take on the complicated world of humans. Although the people don’t navigate it much better, with every human character being one-note caricatures that barely keep up with the sheep. This is where the film gets very broad, which may be off-putting to some, but the silliness of the people drives home that the human world is what’s uncanny and strange to our main characters.

Even with that broadness, though, the film doesn’t go for big laughs. It strikes a milder amusement, never letting the frivolity completely remove the shadow hanging over the story. It’s always at the top of the character’s mind that there’s a murder to solve, and once they do figure it out, they’ll be left to figure out the rest of their lives. George had taken excellent care of them, nurtured both their bodies and minds, and made them into the kind of sheep that could go out into the world to solve his murder. Granted, he wasn’t expecting to be murdered, but he had set them up for success no matter what they may face. Sounds a little like parenting, doesn’t it? And the sheep, well, they could easily be read as children taking their first steps into the big, complicated world. Or you can just take them as sheep detectives. Either works, but the fact that you could tap into something much bigger is what makes The Sheep Detectives such a surprise.

Release: now in theaters
Director: Kyle Balda
Writer: Craig Mazin
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Nicholas Braun, Nicholas Galitzine, Molly Gordon, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston, Chris O’Dowd, Regina Hall, Patrick Stewart, Bella Ramsey, Brett Goldstein, Hong Chau, Emma Thompson