The Sheep Detectives

 On his blog, my brother avers that dogs don't fear death.  The novelist, John Banville, makes the same assertion about the dog, Rex, in his novel The Infinities.  According to The Sheep Detectives, sheep similarly are skeptical about death, as least as it applies to their species:  as far as they are concerned, sheep simply evolve into white, fluffy clouds that form herds in the sky.  They don't die but are transformed into atmospheric phenomena -- every rainstorm involves a sheep cloud leaking water onto the earth.  Sheep are, also, marvelous forgetters -- although they witness the death of members of their kind, this event is so strange to them and resistant to reason, that it fails to impress its record upon their memories.  At the end of the movie, we see a marvelous image of a mighty ram formed from a thunderhead looming over the pastures -- this is the spirit of the wise ram, Sebastian, returned as a kind of avenging tempest.  

The film's plot seems derived from those macabre but cozy British murder mysteries that are a staple of PBS and Brit Box.   A kindly shepherd, played by Hugh Jackman, spends each evening reading aloud from British mystery novels to his flock.  He assumes that the exercise is futile and that his flock doesn't understand the words that he reads.  But, in fact, the animals are listening intently and taking to heart the plot devices and structure of such mysteries -- indeed, they discuss the mysteries among themselves.  When the shepherd is mysteriously murdered, the sheep under the leadership of a wise ewe are determined to solve his murder and bring the culprit to justice.  The story involves the staples of British mystery -- a group of about eight likely suspects all of whom are, more or less, fair candidates for suspicion, a Last Will and Testament that disinherits an heir, a fortune in royalties for a sort of sheep dip medication invented by the shepherd, and a bumbling local constable. The mystery is competently presented, complete with various twists and turns and, of course, concludes with the sheep figuring out how to ingeniously present their solution to the relevant humans.  The movie is very pretty, with landscapes that look like vistas out of Constable and Turner.  The movie is mildly entertaining -- indeed, everything about the picture is mild, unassuming and genteel.  There's no violence and no suspense except the mild uncertainty associated with a civilized whodunnit.  The perpetrator is revealed, an implied romance between the constable and one of the suspects blossoms, and all is well at the end of the movie. The picture is mildly didactic, about accepting the inevitability of death, about the dead as benign presences in our imagination, with a message about accepting outsiders and welcoming them into the fold -- the sheep are inexplicably hostile to so-called "winter lambs" (that is, sheep born in the winter) since most sheep come into the word in the Spring.  However, a winter lamb plays an instrumental part in solving the murder and, then, earns a place as a part of the flock.

The picture shows the sheep as naturalistically rendered -- they appear to be real sheep although the credits establish that they are, in fact, animated.  The animation is photo-realistic so that the different species of sheep can be identified.  For instance, I recognized rams and ewes of the kind I saw on the Navajo reservation in Arizona, the distinctive Churra breed with rams sporting four majestically curled horns.  The excellent animation which renders the sheep with zoological precision contributes to the film's tedium.  By their nature, sheep are not expressive.  And, as animated in this movie, they don't show any kind of facial features and, when they speak, their mouths don't really move -- simply put, sheep (as opposed to Disney style cartoon characters) can't act and don't show any emotion with their rather dull-looking faces.  I've watched plenty of British mystery shows with my wife -- Inspector Lewis, Vera, and Shetland, for instance -- and those programs are all very expressively acted and offer to the viewer a broad range of eccentric types and personalities all vividly portrayed.  A herd of sheep, even of wildly different breeds, doesn't offer much in the way of an appeal to the eye.  The sheep all look dully similar.  The animation features a veritable who's who of contemporary actors -- Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Chris O'Dowd, and other luminaries -- but these voices all emerge from the placid, nondescript faces of sheep that can't act with their countenances at all.  It would have been better, I think, to eschew the realistic style of animation and give the sheep Disney-style characters and more humanoid faces (like the rat in Ratatouile or the sea creatures in Finding Nemo).  My wife, who loves mysteries, fell asleep during the movie and, indeed, slept soundly for most of its 90 minute length.  There are some very interesting things in the movie -- mostly, its theology and mythology as to the beliefs of the sheep -- but the complicated murder plot isn't sufficiently engaging to support the film.