Seen before a showing of The Sheep Detectives.
Having read the book, I was really looking forward to this one. For me the trailer left open the question of whether The Sheep Detectives was going to be aimed at children or not. Seeing the trailers below left no doubt that it was a kids flick. A bit disappointing but I still anticipated a lot of fun.
Regardless of the intended audience, the talking sheep were well rendered and a blast.
The filmmakers changed a lot in pursuit of a PG rating. For example, the shepherd, George wasn't impaled with a spade as in the book. Drug running? Gone! Etc. Again, one must accept that it's a movie for children whereas the book was for adults.
In the book, George's home - his trailer or caravan - is locked and we are introduced to the townsfolk through the sheeps' eyes when they come and try to enter the it in pursuit of what we don't know and for their own, obsure motivations, neither of which we come to understand until the end. The movie elides this method of telling us about the humans and instead introduces a new character, a reporter named Elliot Matthews, who has come to town for a cultural fair. We get all kinds of scenes involving no sheep at all, something which I believe the book eschewed completely.
The movie's primary goal is to entertain the audience with cute anthropomorphic sheep that make you laugh; the book was more interested in humanity and used the sheep to constantly comment on the townspeople, their foibles, their failings, and the mixed bag of motivations that they and we all are. Humans become more complex and contradictory when the sheep listen in on their conversations.
A little of this ovine commentary on humanity survives in the movie and I am thinking of the scene when the sheep are walking along and one of them talks about God, the name they have bestowed upon the local priest, and their incredulity at his behavior. But I missed how the sheep used their senses of smell to glean information as this is greatly downplayed in the movie. The sheep are basically humans with wool and on four legs here whereas in the book they are no doubt anthropomorphic but they have different attitudes and priorities and are constantly commenting on the contrasts between our two species. The sheep aren't non-human enough here.
While I preferred the ovine commentary of the book to the movie's more stripped-down cutesy murder mystery approach, the movie was still great fun. The sheep were cute and my heart went out to the winter lamb who was shunned by the rest of the flock, one of the very few ways the movie attempted to bring some intersheepal dynamics to the flock. I laughed, pondered the mystery, and enjoyed every second of talking sheep.
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The first thing we saw that wasn't a Coke commercial was a trailer for Studio Ghibli Fest 2026 which starts in the summer.
Now, a nice looking rendition of the Necronomicon and baby Cthulhu I did not expect.
This looks to be something like a live action The Simpsons movie.
