For the lucky majority, our first encounter with death comes via the animal kingdom.
When my family pet rabbit Floppy was no longer in its cage and my dad informed us that Floppy had moved to a nice farm, I was just old enough to know this was a euphemism, and young enough to still cry about it. (Years later, I found out that Floppy actually did get moved to a farm. And that I had wasted tears on a bunny who was currently thriving out in the country. I wonder if Floppy wondered what happened to us, or if he was too preoccupied by carrots.)
For all its sunny colors and talking CGI animals, the new hit film “The Sheep Detectives” is preoccupied with death. This surprised me, as it probably surprised a young father at my screening and certainly surprised his toddler, who bawled her little eyes out at one such brush with mortality. This is for the best; animal deaths serve as an introductory memento mori and build character. I wouldn’t be half the blogger I am now without Old Yeller.
“The Sheep Detectives” reverses the usual dynamic, this time with the animals getting a crash course in mortality. The titular sheep sherlocks are the flock of farmer George (Hugh Jackman), a tender shepherd who raises them only for wool and reads them mystery stories before bed.
George seems to get along much better with sheep than people. He manages to sustain several feuds in his little village, sparring with the local butcher, a rival farmer, an ex-girlfriend, even the vicar. So the sheep aren’t hurting for suspects when they find George poisoned in his field. It turns out they listened far more intently to those stories than George anticipated, accidentally training them to solve his own murder.
George’s demise comes as quite a shock to the sheep, as they previously assumed death was just a fictional construct in their bedtime stories. Sheep, it seems, have the ability to forget bad memories at the count of three, which is why none of them can recall what happened to their parents. They instead believe that at a certain age, sheep ascend to the sky and become clouds. Why else would those things in the sky have wool?
The most interesting aspects of “The Sheep Detectives” are reminiscent of “Watership Down,” another modern film depicting the human world seen through an animal’s prism. The sheep are incredibly suspicious of pavement, as any ground that isn’t grass might as well be lava. They also struggle with the human conception of God, who they are informed is somehow a shepherd, a lamb, and bread all at once.
For all their ability to forget bad memories, the sheep society is far from utopian. Creatures of habit and instinct, they reject any lamb born in the winter outside the usual spring mating season. The sheep love George, but don’t quite understand why he wastes so much time tending to the winter lambs on the periphery; can’t he see that they’re just … wrong?
The plot of “The Sheep Detectives” is that of a murder mystery, but its perspective offers hints of a Christian worldview throughout.
For one thing, the sheep learn that a life avoiding or ignoring suffering is hardly a life at all. Their denial of death and any suffering keeps them stagnant and stupid, and it is only when they choose to remember and honor the dead that they begin to grow as sheeple. The movie hints that the sheep’s concept of the afterlife isn’t that far off, but an afterlife without death is missing the point entirely. Suffering may be hard to accept, but isn’t character made of the furrows and channels left behind after suffering rolls through?
Over its 110 minutes, one question echoes through the film: what makes a good shepherd? George of course is our Gallant, but the film offers Goofuses to contrast (the film’s clergyman, the town vicar, fails George at his greatest time of need, for example). The Bible says a good shepherd calls his sheep by name: George’s shepherd rival raises lambs for the slaughter and doesn’t even bother to name them. The flock might end up under his “care” if the mystery isn’t solved, giving them something of a personal rooting interest.
As the sheep struggle to see God as both shepherd and lamb, they also fail to see that a sheep can also be a shepherd, and a poor one at that. The sheep tout the importance of the flock while rejecting the outsiders amongst them. George was a good shepherd precisely because he cared for the winter lambs, prioritizing that lost sheep over the other hundred. Maturity comes from seeing this as the virtue to imitate, rather than a quirk to tolerate for further bedtime stories.
The sheep are only able to crack the case when they listen to the testimony of the winter lamb, a creature that goes from being scorned and rejected to being their salvation. If the flock isn’t able to wrap their head around the hypostatic union of God as both shepherd and lamb, they’re happy to baaaanefit from it anyway.
I’m sorry, I almost managed to make it to the end.
