The Sheep Detectives

Kyle Balda’s film is not an animated feature in the usual sense: the people are live action, the sheep computer generated. Hugh Jackman plays the shepherd George Hardy on screen, Emma Thompson his solicitor, Nicholas Braun the village policeman. The flock is the voiced half: Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Lily, a Shetland ewe steeped in crime novels, Bryan Cranston as Sebastian, a Castlemilk Moorit ram rescued from a carnival, Chris O’Dowd as Mopple the Merino who forgets nothing. Framestore built the animals, each a real breed; the head-butting twin Norfolk Horn rams are Ronnie and Reggie, after the Kray twins. Craig Mazin wrote it. Producer Lindsay Doran brought him Leonie Swann’s 2005 novel Three Bags Full in 2007, the rights took close to a decade, Mazin wrote a first draft in 2016 and that studio passed. It carried the title Three Bags Full: A Sheep Detective Movie until the autumn of 2025. Shooting ran through the summer of 2024 around Buckinghamshire villages and at Shepperton Studios. A good fit if you want a whodunnit rebuilt from an animal vantage point, with clues actually planted and paid off. Not for a viewer who cannot take the BBFC’s PG advice with a small child: snarling dogs chase the sheep, the animals learn they may be slaughtered, and a dead body is shown.