Charming yarn

There’s a certain kind of little British film that wants very much to be sweet and charming.

It’s a tricky genre. When it’s forced, sweetness can easily become sugary, charming can tip over into twee.

This all-ages talking-sheep comedy-mystery gets it right. With a lot of Babe sincerity and a smidge of Knives Out self-awareness, The Sheep Detectives is cosy but never complacent.

Using a deft blend of live-action and CGI animation, the story starts with George (Hugh Jackman), a shepherd who tends his flock just outside Denbrook, a picture-perfect village with thatched roofs, half-timbered walls and a mossy churchyard.

George ends each day by reading Golden Age murder mysteries to the sheep, even though he doesn’t actually think they understand English. Audience members, though — who get to hear these four-footed characters arguing over whether the murderer is the suspicious maid or the scheming nephew — know better.

When their beloved George is found lying dead on a grassy hill, three go-getting ungulates are determined to solve the crime.

Lead detective Lily is voiced, with calm rationality, by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, while her woolly Watsonian sidekick, Mopple, is brought to life by The Big Door Prize’s Chris O’Dowd. Sebastian (Bryan Cranston) is a sarcastic loner — “Do you know what humans call people who can’t think for themselves?” he asks the flock pointedly — but as it turns out, he has reasons for being distrustful.

As the trio’s gentle bickering (“No eating the crime scene!”) gives an Only Murders in the Meadow vibe, the sheep manage to nudge Tim (Succession’s Nicholas Braun), the adorably hapless village bobbie, toward some clues. Finally, everyone comes together for the dramatic Poirot-like reveal.

Freely adapting the novel Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann, scripter Craig Mazin uses the sheep’s knowledge of vintage mysteries to poke affectionate fun at the genre’s conventions.

The rural police are, of course, incompetent — they always think the murder has been committed by a drifter — and require the assistance of some gifted amateurs. There’s a big-city solicitor (crisply played by Emma Thompson) who comes down to read the will. There are red herrings, long-lost twins and taxine poisoning — all very Agatha Christie.

But Mazin, who’s best known for the grim HBO series Chernobyl and The Last of Us, also explores some darker emotional shades. While staying G-rated, The Sheep Detectives takes a deep-felt look at issues of life and death, grief and memory, innocence and experience.

Director Kyle Balda is an animation veteran who has worked on the Minions movies. (There’s not a lot of Minions-style hijinkery here, with the target audience probably skewing more toward older kids all the way up to the Midsomer Murders demographic.)

Balda ensures the animals are both realistically sheepy and remarkably expressive. This involves a lot of eye and ear action, along with distinctive voice performances. Filling out the flock are Patrick Stewart, using his “hammy old actor” vocals, Rhys Darby as goofy comic relief, Regina Hall as a floofy diva and Brett Goldstein doing double duty as a pair of squabbling, cement-headed brothers.

The human characters are less developed. There’s a reporter desperate for his big break (Nicholas Galitzine). There’s a beefy town butcher (Conleth Hill) who looked down on George for his plant-based diet. (He puts up with vegetarianism in women but can’t abide it in men.) There’s an American daughter suddenly turned up (Molly Gordon), a rival shepherd with a hidden agenda (Caleb Merrow), an innkeeper with a secret (Hong Chau), and a vicar (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith) who seems to be examining his conscience.

We have a nice pool of suspects, then, but for all the sheep’s talk of motive, means and opportunity, the mechanics of the mystery are pretty perfunctory.

Still, life itself is a mystery, as George suggests at one point, and our animal and human heroes’ investigation into that enigma manages to be lovely, funny, sad and sweet, all at the same time.

winnipegfreepress.com/alisongillmor