Joel on Film

Absolutely nothing about The Sheep Detectives, an adaptation of Leonie Swann’s 2005 novel Three Bags Full, is easy to anticipate. We don’t expect, for instance, that a fully credible murder mystery could be crafted out of a story starring a farm’s worth of animals, brought to life by some seamless digital effects, but here is one that contains a few twists, an ensemble of interesting human characters and even a neat “here’s what happened”-type montage that reveals just how considered and thoughtful the sense of plotting here is. We certainly don’t expect the results to be as occasionally moving as they are in what amounts to a pretty silly comedy about a bunch of farm animals.

That’s the thing about family-friendly movies such as this one, which obviously brings to mind a modern classic about a sheep-pig: It proves that a big studio and a smart director (in this case, Kyle Balda, making his live action debut behind the camera) need not treat the young ones in the audience as if they have no intelligence or ability to follow logic. In less able hands, this movie very well could have been an endless joke fest, full of fart humor and farmland puns. Instead, these animals are every bit as thoroughly developed as the human ones and are voiced by actors who understand what is asked of them.

The mystery here surrounds the sudden and suspicious death of George Hardy (Hugh Jackman), the owner of the farm on which a number of sheep and rams reside. From appearances, it seems the good shepherd might have had a heart attack just a few feet from his home, but for Lily (voice of Julia Louis-Dreyfus), a Shetland sheep that grew up listening to the murder mystery novels read to her and the other sheep in the flock, there are simply too many questions: Why were there green stains on his hands, an overturned chair in his house, and a second glass as if a visitor was present? Moreover, what happens when humans die, who or what is “God” and how do the other sheep ascend to the heavens to become clouds?

That last question—or, well, many of them in a compound question—is key to the screenplay by Craig Mazin, which is intelligent about the way it approaches these sheep entirely on their level as unlikely protagonists of a murder mystery. The term “sheep” might be used as derogatory toward humans who flout their own intellect, a fact of which these animals are all painfully aware, but that doesn’t necessarily mean these sheep or any others are as foolish as the term suggests. They’re simply naïve in the manner of children constantly learning through questioning everything around them.

To sheep, it makes sense that others become clouds when they die, because after all, the fluffiness of their wool matches the apparent fluffiness of the liquid aerosols in the sky. To sheep, the concept of a god—specifically, the Christian one, who is both lamb and shepherd—is completely alien, and therefore, an afterlife is limited to their understanding of whatever clouds might be. More specifically, because all they know as a logical framework is that of a murder mystery, their naivete is well-suited to the conundrum placed before them.

Like any good mystery, there are suspects, too: George, having developed a type of proprietary veterinarian medicine, was quite a rich fellow, and so a large sum left in his wake offers a solid motive for murder. A few suspects arrive, some of them positioned only as red herrings (played by Tosin Cole, Hong Chau and Conleth Hill) but one really rises to the top when it’s discovered that she exists. Rebecca (Molly Gordon) was George’s long-lost daughter, and as one sheep says to another, it’s always useful to pay attention when an unexpected character turns up.

Because Mazin really has fashioned a cleverly devised mystery here, though, it’s a pleasant surprise to find oneself genuinely involved in how the pieces of it all come together. Our entryways into this story, of course, are Lily, accompanied by another sheep named Mopple (voice of Chris O’Dowd) who has a perfect memory, and the human police officer Tim (Nicholas Braun), who is also the only police officer in this lovely little village of Denbrook. It’s also a nice surprise, by the way, to find a movie primarily about digital-effects creations that does not waste the human characters sharing the screen with them.

Tim, for instance, is a bit bumbling and in over his head when a murder finally reaches his village, but he’s not unintelligent or entirely incapable of doing his job. He’s definitely charmed by the arrival of Rebecca, for instance, but the fact that she might be a suspect is neither lost on nor forgotten by him. A pair of other characters, played by Nicholas Galitzine and Emma Thompson, arrive in the midst of the whole affair, too, and genuinely add a bit of flair and intrigue in their own right.

It all, though, circles back to the sheep, who are a delightfully daffy bunch of eccentric personalities (Bryan Cranston as a wise and worldly ram, Patrick Stewart as a grumpy old-man sheep, Brett Goldstein as a destructive pair of twins, Bella Ramsey as a small and overlooked winter-born lamb, and a few others) and also a motley crew afforded a solid sense of presence to go beyond their credible existence in the frame with the humans. The Sheep Detectives is certainly onto something if a franchise is to spawn from these characters, but either way, this is a genuinely delightful and consistently entertaining enterprise in its own right.

Rating: ***½ (out of ****)