Darkness In A Kids' Film

Your TLDR is that The Sheep Detectives is genuinely great and you should go see it. Let’s support good family films, so that we and our kids have more than just endless Minion spinoffs in cinemas in the future.

I shouldn’t have been surprised that Sheep Detectives got dark in moments - after all, it’s about a herd of sheep who decide to figure out who murdered their kindly shepherd, played with maximum warmth (and maximum confusing accent) by Hugh Jackman. Seriously, the film goes to great pains to make it clear it’s set in some sort of England, but not really England, and there are lots of different accents on display, so why they made/let Jackman deliver his lines with that sort of hybrid Australian/Northern (?)/mid-Atlantic growl is beside me, but also beside the point. He is such a warm actor! You can see why his sheep are obsessed with him!

But that’s not the only sad bit of the film! Because The Sheep Detectives is, at heart, a story about coming to terms with death. It’s a hoary old trope to point out that crime fiction allows us a measure of control over our lives; in detective novels, especially the Golden Age books beloved of the sheep in this film and to which the story owes an enormous debt, good triumphs, evil is caught and punished, and order is restored. But detective fiction requires that one, ultimately chaotic ingredient: a dead body. And good detective fiction doesn’t just restore order when the killer is caught and the evil deed punished. A good detective novel permits its characters to question, to mourn, and ultimately to accept that death is a necessary part of life. The order that is reimposed is a human order: death comes for us all, but inviting it in early is the ultimate evil act, and the one that cannot be condoned by the living.

The poet Anne Carson writes of ‘the black door,’ the knowledge that death is always near. Some of us learn this too early; some very late. The Sheep Detectives is about the black door, and about learning to live with that knowledge - and, at times, to honour it. Yes, it’s an often very silly film about sheep solving a crime, but yes, it is also about the black door, the tragedy of it… and the value. With our memory, we honour those who have gone, and in our awareness of mortality, we make choices about how we choose to live in the world, with what time is left to us.

That was heavy! I promise, the film is a delight and you should go see it.

Just One More Thing! My kid is currently going through a phase and asking a lot of comparative questions: what’s the smallest rodent? What’s the biggest reptile? This has resulted in some really interesting conversations (smallest rodent: Baluchistan pygmy jerboa and African pygmy mouse) (largest reptile: saltwater crocodile). Last week: is the tallest tree taller than the tallest statue in the world? No, because the Statue of Unity is nearly 600 feet tall. That said…

Hyperion, a giant coast redwood and the tallest tree in the world, is taller than Big Ben (and the Statue of Liberty), at slightly more than 381 feet tall. It may be as much as 800 years old. Hyperion in Greek mythology was the father of Helios; Hyperion the tree is taller than the second-tallest tree in the world… Helios.

Thanks for reading!

Sheep photo by Martin Schmidli on Unsplash