Be careful about reading too many detective novels to your pet sheep — they just might solve your murder. Or perhaps the fantastical plot of the appealing “The Sheep Detectives” is the best endorsement for exposing animals to works of mystery fiction, and an important correction to the stereotype that sheep aren’t the smartest creatures in the animal kingdom.
That’s the premise of German novelist Leonie Swann’s “Three Bags Full,” which has been adapted into the cozy mystery “The Sheep Detectives,” about a flock of sheep who help solve the murder of their beloved shepherd, George Hardy (Hugh Jackman). The film knits together highly realistic animation with a live-action cast to weave a charming yarn that can delight the whole family.
In the vein of an Agatha Christie novel, “The Sheep Detectives” assembles a group of suspects in the small English village of Denbrook, alluding to some long-standing feuds that the otherwise mild-mannered shepherd George has nursed with his neighbors. There’s the butcher, Ham (Conleth Hill), and the other shepherd, Caleb (Tosin Cole), who herds his sheep with aggressive dogs. There’s Beth (Hong Chau), the nosy innkeeper, who nabs George’s letters from the post, and the local reverend (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith), a shepherd of his own flock, to whose church George has donated large sums.
It’s all too much to bear for the village’s hapless lone policeman, Tim (Nicholas Braun), who is both aided and impeded by the arrival of three newcomers: Elliot Matthews (Nicholas Galitzine), an intrepid reporter itching for the scoop on a small-town murder mystery, Lydia Harbottle (Emma Thompson), George’s lawyer, there to read the will, and Rebecca (Molly Gordon), a mysterious American relative who conveniently shows up in town the day after the murder.
But in this film, the humans are merely the supporting players. The real heroes are the sheep that George lovingly looked after, naming each and every one, reading to them every night from mystery novels, which we discover the sheep discuss among themselves in between chapters.
Using their amateur sleuthing skills honed through these stories, Lily (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss) and Mopple (Chris O’Dowd) set out to solve George’s murder alongside black sheep Sebastian (Bryan Cranston). That means sussing out clues and leaving them in plain sight for the clueless Officer Tim.
It’s a cute story with a great cast, and a high-concept murder mystery. But what you might not expect is how moving this whole story actually is. It’s actually a tale about the importance of finding, and tending to, a flock.
One of the concepts that George explains in a letter to a loved one that serves as an opening narration, is the idea of a winter lamb, who are often rejected by the flock for simply being born at the wrong time. A tiny winter lamb (Tommy Birchall) struggles to find acceptance even in George’s happy, well-loved flock, and tough, gritty black sheep Sebastian reveals he was born a winter lamb too, dictating his hardscrabble life.
It all comes as a shock to Lily, our heroine, and much of her journey is about learning and growing herself, accepting others, and doing hard things.
Part of that is tending to all of the sheep in her flock, and the other element is remembering everything that happens, something she’ll have to do to solve the mystery, but is not a common practice in this flock.
The wise Mopple, who remembers everything, encourages Lily not to remember the hard parts of life, which the rest of the sheep happily zap from their brains. “Remembering hurts,” says Lily, heartbreakingly, but Mopple reminds her that there is also joy to be found in memories of loved ones, a deeply poignant lesson at the heart of this otherwise cute and quirky movie.
The Sheep Detectives
Three stars out of four
