I loved this movie.  It lived up to its good reviews.  It’s very much in the same mould as Babe, with just as wholesome a message about the importance of animal welfare and kindness to all creatures, and with improved animation.

George, played by Hugh Jackman, is a shepherd who lives in a caravan surrounded by lush green fields in an idyllic rural setting near a picturesque village that looks like it could double as a set for Midsomer Murders.  As in Babe, the location of the setting isn’t specified, but it obviously draws on the same idealised vision of the English countryside.  

George is a good shepherd.  He raises his sheep purely for their wool.  They’re not destined for the abattoir, no sir.  In fact, they’ve somehow come to believe that when one of them grows old and leaves the flock, he or she has risen up to the sky and become a fluffy cloud.  Only humans die.  They also have the gift – or is it? – of being able to collectively forget nasty things that happen.  

He’s given them all names – there’s big old ram Sebastian, clever ewe Lily, a couple of boisterous young rams called Ronnie and Reggie who love headbutting things, an older, wiser ram called Mopple who refuses the comfort of forgetting bad things and remembers everything, and a handful of youngsters that leap about in a way that reminded me of the line from an old folk song:

In early spring when small birds sing and lambkins sport and play…

There’s one sad weedy little lambkin rejected by the flock because it was born in winter.  Leading lady Lily explains for our benefit that sheep are known for rejecting ‘winter lambs’.  A Gemini search confirmed that this is true, and has to do with the challenges of mothering infants in winter.  This being a family-friendly movie, we just know Winter Lamb will come to share in the happy ending.  

The village has a postmistress, a police officer – just the one, and a butcher.  This being a story that regards vegetarianism as a virtue, he’s not portrayed as a sympathetic character.  But all the human characters except George have their failings.  The postmistress isn’t above peeking at people’s letters, the policeman seems to be a bit of a dunce, George’s farmer neighbour has designs on George’s flock.  A young journalist comes to town to cover the annual craft festival and is scornful of its provincial scale, a bit like Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day.  

The casting is appropriately diverse.  The sheep come in all colours, and so to a lesser extent do the humans.  With an eye on the transatlantic market the movie gives the female sheep, including chief sleuth Lily, American accents (Lily is voiced by Julia-Louis Dreyfus) while the other characters talk in a variety of mostly English accents: George sounds like a Somerset farmer, the butcher sounds like a London barrow-boy, George’s fast-talking estate lawyer Lydia talks like (and is played by) Emma Thompson, Reggie and Ronnie are ovine versions of the Kray Twins, and wise old Mopple is voiced by Irish actor Chris O’Dowd.  

George reads to his flock every night, mainly detective stories.  They love it, and they learn a lot about crime and motivation and suchlike.  When they find George lying dead outside his caravan one morning, they use their acquired forensic savvy to uncover his killer.  It’s amazing the places a sheep can go without attracting the suspicions of humans, and they work things out by finding clues they leave around for the humans to find.  In the course of their crime-solving they learn important lessons about memory, death and acceptance of difference within their own flock.  

As I said, the animation is an improvement on even Babe’s high standard.  The humans don’t hear or see the sheep talking among themselves, but we do, and their facial expressions and speech movements are delightfully spot-on. 

There are some very funny lines, and a great visual gag along the lines of why the chicken crossed the road.

There’s no violence, or not much.  There’s enough not to take very little ones along to see it.  They might find the neighbour’s savage big black dogs a bit scary.    

The Sheep Detectives works both as a moral fable and as a whodunnit.  The plot is satisfyingly twisty and turny and full of red herrings and small mysteries – does George have a distant sweetheart or a long-lost daughter or both? Why does Sebastian keep his distance from the flock? Every one of the human characters could be a suspect, but I didn’t guess the villain until the very end, which comes in traditional Agatha Christie/Death in Paradise style, with all the suspects gathered together for the denouement.