The Sheep Detectives

This movie is based on Three Bags Full (or Glennkill: Ein Schafskrimi in the German original). That book was a delight, a proper old-fashioned Krimi. It had all the hallmarks of an Agath Christie murder mystery: a gruesome death in a remote location, a motley assortment of strong characters, philosophical musings about the mortal coil, but also light relief. And all the protagonists are sheep!

So yes, there are anthropomorphised, talking sheep. And yes, that is very funny. But the novel is not playing it for cheap laughs. And the protagonists are like humans but they are still very... well, sheepish. Their brains just work differently, their memory works differently, and they have different values than humans. It is all silly but also deadly serious and has a real emotional impact.

Not so the film.

• We are making a movie about talking sheep - well best to make it a PG to get the toddlers into the cinema!
• The sheep are solving a murder - oh that's hilarious, let's play it for laughs as much as we can, nobody is gonna take this seriously anyway!
• But it's an Agath Christie style murder mystery... Oh great, an excuse to make every character into a cardboard cutout of a "type" and exaggerate so much that even a 4 year old will get it.
• It's set in Ireland - excellent, we'll put it into England instead and use every stereotype available to us. But let's also do some very American product placement because, you know, we're Amazon.

I did actually enjoy myself enough to justify the 2 hours of my life I spent watching this. The animated sheep are really cute after all! But I will have to re-read the book now to wash the bad and sickly-sweet taste out of my mouth. Also to remind myself of the story because I don't think it was anything like the one in the movie...