If you were to cross the Babe movies with a cozy murder mystery set around a small town in the English countryside… it’d most likely be terrible, to be honest. Insufferably twee, and so soft as to be completely insubstantial, likely full of desperate attempts to give it an “edge” that do nothing but draw attention to how insincere it is. But there’s still a small chance that you’d get it right, and end up with something like The Sheep Detectives.
The premise is that George (played by Hugh Jackman) is a shepherd who’s beloved by his flock, while having contentious relationships with the humans in the town nearby. He lives alone in a small trailer on his land, caring for his sheep, giving all of them1Except one names because everyone deserves a name, and raising them for their wool, because he’s a vegetarian. Every night, he reads to them from his collection of classic murder mysteries.
When the sheep wake up one morning to find George lying dead outside the caravan, poisoned, the smartest sheep in the flock, Lily (voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfuss), decides that they owe it to him to find his murderer and help bring them to justice.
Based on that, you might have a clear image in your mind of what this movie is, and it’s likely the same as what I’d been expecting. Assuming that the surreal genius of Babe: Pig in the City is a lightning-in-a-bottle one-off, the best you could probably hope for is something as classic and heartwarming as the first Babe, or maybe a more rural Paddington. The worst would be the seemingly countless, derivative, live-action-but-the-animals-talk movies where the CGI teams are making some effort, but everybody else involved has just shrugged and said, “eh, it’s for kids” on the way to cashing their paychecks. And most likely, it’d be at neither extreme, but the kind of bland commercial product that isn’t even interesting enough to be particularly offensive, and is forgotten by everyone the moment the studio stops paying to market it.
One thing to be aware of is that The Sheep Detectives is full of moments that are exactly that: Emma Thompson reacting in open-mouthed shock at zany antics happening just off-screen, or doing pratfalls as those crazy sheep cause a ruckus. Characters setting up their catch-phrases or verbal tics2Like a lamb voiced by Bella Ramsey who’s like a toddler that’s constantly asking questions that all have a pay-off by the conclusion, like checking items off a list3The rams voiced by Brett Goldstein. The corny gags and the heartwarming moments that seem as if they’re coming out on a conveyor belt from the Hollywood Machine, exactly as ordered.
But while watching it, I kept thinking “everyone here knows exactly what movie they’re making.” And I realized how that phrase can be either derogatory or complimentary. It could mean that everyone was aware of the Minimum Viable Product, and put in just enough thought and effort to deliver what was expected from the material. Or that the filmmakers understood all of the hundreds of details that work together to establish the tone.
In The Sheep Detectives, I got the sense that they took all of the familiar components of a “family movie” and a cozy mystery, and then went back to the basics, using those components how they were originally intended to work, before they all got dulled from overuse and made to feel lazy, shallow, and formulaic.
The movie was directed by Kyle Balda, who did some work on Day of the Tentacle at LucasArts before going on to ILM, Pixar, and several projects at Illumination. I mention that because I’m assuming that you have to be intimately familiar with how the “animated family movie” formula works before you can reconstruct it to work as originally intended. No small part of that is taking the animation as such a basic prerequisite for this movie that it has to be flawless at a minimum. There’s no novelty in it anymore; in 2026, most people just assume “yeah, they can make animals talk now” without giving any thought to how much work goes into that. And I only noticed it at all in a couple of shots in the beginning, when Jackman was interacting directly with one of the sheep. I quickly stopped even thinking of them as computer-generated and just accepted that they’d cast a bunch of real sheep who happened to have familiar voices.
And the filmmaking has to be near-flawless so as not to draw attention to itself, and let the story work. I’m assuming that’s attributable to the screenplay by Craig Mazin, who adapted the book Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann. I was completely unfamiliar with the book (titled Glennkill in its original German), but apparently it’s been seeing similar waves of “how does this concept even work?” puzzlement over and over again in the 20 years since its initial release.
Obviously I can’t have an opinion on the book without having read it, but based solely on the plot synopsis and character breakdown, plus other readers’ reactions, I’m even more impressed by the movie’s adaptation. It sounds like the book’s plot and characters did everything you might expect to give its premise some depth and weight, to keep it from feeling twee and insubstantial. The murder itself is more violent, there are multiple murders, the shepherd is less lovable and is suicidal, and there are more true-crime elements like adultery, alcoholism, and drug smuggling.
The Sheep Detectives softens all of that and makes it family-friendly, but the changes don’t feel as if they lose the substance of what makes the story compelling. The core of the movie is still there, taking what’s inherently interesting about the premise, and just presenting it in a way that a much wider audience can appreciate.
Because on top of combining a heartwarming-talking-animal movie with a cozy murder mystery, The Sheep Detectives throws in a few more story types. How about a hint of Watership Down? Some Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Hell, throw in The Ugly Duckling while we’re at it.
I can’t tell how many of these elements were carried over from the original book, but the idea of the sheep behaving as sheep seems to be at the core of both. They’re not anthropomorphized; they have their own priorities, their own innate and unchangeable behaviors, their own way of thinking about things, and little frame of reference to be able to understand the concepts of what the humans are talking about, even if they can understand the words. That’s the part that reminds me of Watership Down, even though this story is nowhere near as violent, nor as intent on establishing a complete society and mythology for its animals as that novel does for its rabbits.
Instead, the sheep just have a frame of reference in which the field is their entire universe. They’ve got their own prejudices, their own understanding of life and death, and almost all of them have the special ability to willingly forget things that are too difficult or painful for them. After a childhood raised on Disney movies, Watership Down was the first book I read that made me consider what it might actually be like if prey animals were really sentient, instead of just stand-ins for human beings.
It was initially jarring seeing all of these disparate additional ideas being injected into a movie that didn’t need them. They’re unnecessary for the movie that’s shown in the trailers, a wacky and heartwarming family movie about some plucky sheep on a mission. I could easily see them streamlined out of a Hollywood production; maybe a studio exec might insist on keeping the subplot about winter lambs, to deliver the tear-jerking payoff at the end.4Literally tear-jerking, and I was glad to see the adult men seated on either side of me also surreptitiously wiping their eyes just like I was. But the other stuff just doesn’t seem to be what this movie is all about. Families want to see a bunch of cute animals solving a mystery!
At the other extreme, when I saw that the source novel was originally in German, I immediately imagined an almost certainly unfair stereotype. Without considering whether the original novel was even ever intended as young-adult reading, I imagined someone with an exaggerated Werner Herzog accent slamming their fist on a table and shouting The children have been coddled and pampered by Hollywood for far too long! They must be instructed of the cruelty and injustice that is key to our experience. Why do they cry for creatures who haven’t even the capacity to comprehend that they exist for their utility as food and clothing material?
And just due to the timing of their release, it seemed like the current animated Animal Farm is a perfect counter-example of how not to do it. Even if it were made with the best of intentions, it seems designed to make sophisticated and dark ideas accessible to wider audiences by ruining or undermining every single thing that makes them sophisticated. Perhaps that’s not the case, and it’s just fine, but I’ll never know, because everything I’ve seen about it is so absurdly tone-deaf that it reads as a parody of how clueless Hollywood execs would adapt Animal Farm.
In The Sheep Detectives, it feels like all of the disparate subplots are included not because they’re essential to the story, but because they’re essential to why the story is worth telling in the first place. The real implications of the death of a loved one, which is usually ignored by cozy murder mysteries eager to turn them into nothing more than a puzzle to be solved. The importance of holding onto all of our memories, even the difficult ones, because they’re the ones that make us capable of appreciating the value of kindness and inclusion.
I don’t have kids, and I’ve never had to deal with any nightmares apart from my own, so I’m not qualified to say whether The Sheep Detectives is suitable for everyone. But I’d recommend it for audiences of any age old enough to have had the concepts of death and of eating animals explained to them. The murder mystery itself is treated as a non-violent puzzle to be solved, and the scariest sequence involves dogs attacking a sheep; that violence is more suggested than explicitly shown, but I can definitely imagine it upsetting very young children.
But the thing I love about The Sheep Detectives is that it really feels like a family movie from a time back when the term actually meant what it said. Not just a formulaic story with all of the rough edges sanded down, and some references or suggestive jokes thrown in to keep the parents from being too bored. Instead, something that an audience of all ages can watch together, that illustrates the core values of family movies instead of just reciting them, and everyone will be able to take something meaningful out of it.
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