When presented with the German internationally popular source novel, the reductionist approach to the conundrum of what to do with a whodunnit where clever sheep are the detectives would have been to just turn it into a cutesy story with talking animals. Thankfully, that temptation has been avoided.
Hugh Jackman is a reclusive shepherd reading murder mysteries to his flock outside a picturebook English village, until one morning he's found poisoned. So his sheep do take it on themselves to investigate, although they haven't ever been exposed properly to the concept of death. The bedtime stories that their benevolent master has told them have simply led them to believe that only people in books die, and sheep turn into clouds when their time is up. But the quest the most intrepid of them undertake to discover the truth of what happened then also brings many more lessons about the nature of reality, some of these terrifying.
Even if the plot is very much yet another of those currently faddish Agatha Christie by-the-numbers affairs, and the fact that it's still fundamentally a film to take your kids to means that the denouement has to both be sugary and contain a big life lesson, the artfully animated sheep (voiced by the likes of Bryan Cranston and Patrick Stewart) are fully-realised characters and there are many truly perspicacious and hilarious moments too. So, to recap, not just another loud kids' film dependent on CGI and action sequences, but something far more rewarding, akin to Paddington 2.
7/10
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