Perhaps one of the most insidious side effects of Hollywood’s 21st-century digital revolution was the proliferation of what may be modern cinema’s greatest menace: talking animals. For much of the ’90s, non-animated movies featuring animals focused on real monkeys, apes, and/or dogs doing some equivalent of silent-movie antics (or just, you know, playing sports that are usually played by humans). But in the aftermath of a Best Picture nomination for the acclaimed family film Babe, the smash success of Eddie Murphy’s Dr. Dolittle remake, and the rise of more production-accessible computer effects that were no longer reserved for the biggest blockbusters, pseudo-live-action talking animals ran wild in Hollywood.
Sometimes footage of real animals was augmented with creepy computerized mouths. Eventually, the critters were more likely to be created whole-cloth on a computer. Regardless of the technique, the movies that resulted are, by and large, horrifying. Cats & Dogs. Racing Stripes. G-Force. Even a crime movie like Kangaroo Jack was successfully marketed as if it featured a rapping kangaroo, despite the fact that this was apparently actually a single hallucination scene. (I can’t say firsthand, because I was properly scared off by said marketing.) Come to think of it, why weren’t more of these movies actually just terrible hallucinations? The novelty eventually seemed to wear off, or at least mutate into stories of cartoon characters made gruesomely photorealistic, rather than barnyard-variety animals. That Lion King remake helpfully proved that talking-animal movies don’t have to be crude, chintzy-looking junk; they can also be incredibly dull. But The Sheep Detectives looks like a return to that horrifying earlier tradition. Yes, it is a movie where a flock of sheep attempts to solve a cozy small-town murder mystery.
It is also, against most if not all odds, the most affecting talking-animal picture in ages, maybe since those Babe movies. The tipoff might have been the movie’s impressive cast, featuring Hugh Jackman as a solitary but kindly shepherd who mysteriously turns up dead; Hong Chau, Molly Gordon, and Emma Thompson as some of the suspects; and the voice talents of Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston, Regina Hall, Chris O’Dowd, and Patrick Stewart as a bunch of sheep. Then again, Racing Stripes features two-time Academy Award winner Dustin Hoffman, so it’s not a call you can necessarily make on the basis of celebrity involvement.
And for that matter, some of the best performers in The Sheep Detectives get the short shrift from a murder mystery that clearly includes some characters as a matter of padding the suspect list rather than really inspiring characterization. Hong Chau in particular, typically a highlight of anything she appears in, doesn’t get much to do, and it’s not especially difficult to pinpoint the killer – which makes the movie’s 109-minute runtime a little poky.
What’s surprising about The Sheep Detectives, especially in the context of the movies it superficially resembles, is how affecting its sheep characters are, to the point where the lackluster (if fair-play) mystery seems secondary anyway. Writer Craig Mazin, working from Leonie Swann’s novel Three Bags Full, makes a real effort to place the animals’ psychology somewhere between relatable humanity and unknowable mystery. The sheep can listen attentively while their shepherd reads them mystery novels, and understand the basic formulas from hours of storytelling, yet don’t completely understand how the stories relate (or don’t) to real life; death as a concept is actually quite abstract to them, not unlike a younger school-aged child. When the shepherd dies, his favorite sheep Lily (Louis-Dreyfus) takes it upon herself to find the killer, even though the flock’s culture is to collectively will itself to forget unpleasant memories. Only Mopple (O’Dowd) remembers a greater history, privately bearing that burden while politely shielding others from truths about life – namely, that it eventually ends.
Heady stuff for a talking-sheep movie, no? The presence of Cranston as a literal black sheep who keeps his distance from the flock brings to mind Wes Anderson’s stop-motion film Isle of Dogs, and if this movie can’t quite afford that level of visually inventive whimsy and dark wit, it’s admirably closer to that than G-Force. It’s all the more remarkable that the movie – which is still silly and funny enough for kids to enjoy – is directed by Kyle Balda, whose previous credits in animation aren’t exactly Isle of Dogs level. (He’s mostly worked at Illumination, on movies like the overlapping Despicable Me and Minions series.)
Balda and The Sheep Detectives zero in on a space that most filmmakers working with talking animals are happy to ignore: How those attempts at photorealistic visual effects feel different than traditional talking-animal cartoons, where characters can essentially function as humans in a cute, furry series of alternate outfits. (Going back to Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny, the “animal” conceit is really just an excuse for further stylization where a drawing of a normal human would be a bit dull.) There’s a kind of instinctive wrongness in seeing “real”-looking animals speak like those cartoons while attempting to conform to some heavier physical reality, as if it’s violating the contract that more stylized animation forges with the audience. That uncanny-valley effect can work against human-related visual effects, too, of course; it’s why even technically “convincing” generative A.I. still isn’t that hard to spot. But there’s a monkey’s-paw element of wishful thinking gone wrong to talking animals; plenty of pet owners or animal lovers have doubtless wished for a greater level of understanding, something visual effects can easily provide and just as easily cheapen.
The Sheep Detectives isn’t exactly a bold provocation, subverting our supposed desire for effects-augmented animal antics. It definitely has scenes where sheep run amok, trash-talk ducks, and wreck up humans’ cars; this isn’t Charlie Kaufman’s The Sheep Detectives. But it does also make an attempt to bridge the gap between the misguided fantasy of animal communication and the awkward reality it might entail, rather than making a bunch of animals yammer incessantly, just because we can. It’s finally occurred to filmmakers that the combination of celebrity voices and CG tech might work together to give animal characters some semblance of inner life. Despite the lack of “real” sheep on screen, this is the rare talking-animal movie that seems to like animals more than special effects.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.