“Do you know what humans call stupid people who can’t think for themselves?”

“Uh… Ducks!”

“Sheep!”

I remember when I first saw the trailer for this, other than the fact that Hugh Jackman was in it, I pretty much completely dismissed it as being just another one of those generic kids’ movies that was going to simply come and go. Little did I know that when it was actually released over the weekend, it would get rave reviews with pretty much everyone praising it for how charming and heartfelt it was. While I still thought before going into this movie that the premise of it was quite silly and ridiculous, I wanted to give it a shot simply because of how good the word of mouth was surrounding it.

And thankfully, The Sheep Detectives was a very pleasant surprise indeed. As you can probably assume, it’s a mystery movie about the death of a shepherd (played by Hugh Jackman), whose flock of sheep, who speak and are rather intelligent by the way, decide to investigate his death because at least a few of them suspect foul play. If you weren’t previously aware of the plot, you are probably thinking the exact same thing that I thought before watching it - that sounds pretty dumb. However, I found myself pretty intrigued by the mystery, especially for a movie intended for kids and family, and am happy to say that that aspect of The Sheep Detectives worked quite well for me for the most part.

To be honest, though, the mystery isn’t by any means what made this such a good film in my opinion. Even though I had already heard from the reviews that it was a really heartfelt story, it still managed to surprise me by just how poignant it really was. It starts off with Hugh Jackman’s character, who is named George by the way, narrating what his life is like as a shepherd, while we also see from the sheep’s point of view how they look at life, and particularly how simple they see everything.

Once George dies and the plot kicks in, we go on this adventure with these sheep as they not only try to unravel this mystery, separate from the humans’ investigation, but also almost go on this “coming of age” journey in the sense that they learn a lot more about life. They have this extremely simplistic and quite narrow outlook specifically on life and death, amongst a couple of other things, that slowly starts to change throughout the course of the runtime. It goes to surprisingly not necessarily dark, but very deep places, with that which really surprised me and tugged at my heartstrings more than I ever would have thought. There is this sense of innocence with the sheep, and so when they start to figure out more things that kind of start to take that away, it gets pretty emotional.

It isn’t just heartfelt or even sad, though, as I found myself chuckling at quite a few moments here and there. This movie not only lands with the emotional side of things, but surprisingly with the comedy as well. There is definitely some dumb humor here and there (thankfully, no fart jokes or anything of that sort), but I would say the majority of it is really good. This film manages to take itself seriously in an emotional sense, but also is completely aware of its own nature and definitely makes some good moments out of that. The best bits of comedy are definitely with the sheep going on their own little journey (mainly three of them), as well as the main “human detective but technically a cop” named Tim.

One set of movies that The Sheep Detectives heavily reminded me of are the Paddington films, not only because of their ability to hit deep, but also because of how surprisingly good the CGI is. For being such a simple story and therefore, movie, as weird as it may be to praise a film like this for its visual effects, I found them to be as close to flawless as you can pretty much get. Now, once I looked up the production budget after getting home from the theater, I learned that this movie cost somewhere in the realm of seventy-five million dollars, which is almost as ridiculous as the premise of the story, if not even more so, so maybe that kind of has a negative connotation on the state of bloated budget filmmaking nowadays. Anyways, the CGI was still extremely well done regardless.

The big thing this movie doesn’t do well, however, is how the mystery is ultimately solved. It feels not only extremely contrived, but also extremely “out there.” There are numerous details as well that feel like they were just withheld from the audience so that it would be more difficult to solve, and not for any other narrative purpose. Thankfully, the mystery was definitely not what made the movie for me, so I was still okay with this. It’s still very much worth noting, though, especially for people who are looking for a good mystery (which this is - for the most part).

I have to say that overall, this was easily the most pleasant surprise of the year thus far. It tells a really beautiful but simple story that I really hope reaches more audiences by the end of 2026.