When a Family Movie About Talking Sheep is More Philosophically Aware of the Problem of Death and the Struggle of Existence Than Much Adult Fare

I loved this move (The Sheep Detectives) 

If you get a chance, go and see it and support it.

My thoughts: 
I expected to like this film. I did not expect to love it as much as I did. From the film’s opening montage, which invests us directly in this relationship between this middle aged man and his sheep, the film establishes a level of emotional intelligence and authenticity rarely seen in such films (such films meaning, live action fare with talking animals) 

That really is the film’s greatest surprise and strength, and if the rows of people sobbing in their chairs behind us was any indication, it absolutely succeeds in achieving what it sets out to do, which is to use this unassuming relationship to say something relevant and important about the bigger questions all of us face when it comes to matters of life and death and how it is we exist in this world. 

I’ve been on record expressing my issues with the recent Knives Out film. I mention that film only because in many ways you could overlay this film on top of that one and find certain similarities. The pairing of the struggling believer with the skeptic. The “mystery” acting as vehicle to bring us to the existential crisis. Fleshing out the relationship between the I and the we (and the thou). The religious symbolism. The central emphasis on this metaphorical examination of the shepherd and the sheep. 

There is a key difference here however. Where I found the latest iteration of the Knives Out films failed to justify the grounds for its own exploration of its questions and its journey, and where I found that film deceptively clouded its own atheist conclusions in illusions of a coloured agnostic “skepticism,” this film is clear about what it’s saying and is willing to say when it comes to those same matters of faith and doubt. 

Which is to say, it’s that rare film that is willing to be honest about the implications of different possible conclusions concerning these questions of life and death, and in so doing it manages to do the very thing so many modern ideologies and worldviews and approaches fail to do- it doesn’t romanticize death, it names it. Further, it challenges us to do the same within the framework of the working relationship it is fleshing out, namely in its philosophical analysis of the challenges nature poses to our valourized human constructs. Rather than simply pretend as though secular humanism can afford us a rational ticket and free licence to avoid the logical implications of natures cruelest expressions, it recognizes the limits of many common appeals to dealing with those questions. It also builds on this in a positive direction however, wondering about what these challenges can reveal to us when it comes to moving towards some form of conviction regarding what is true. 

Which is to say, it’s engaged in actually fleshing out the logical argument and giving it power over over our reductionist readings of the world. 

The subject of memory plays a particular role on this front, and to cite one small example of what this film does with its themes, it explores that inevitable cognitive dissonance that emerges from wanting to set our hopes and investments on memory itself- on keeping a memory alive when such “memory” is not only held captive to another, but inevitably as precarious a thing as the others own enslavement to the same powers and forces of death. How we confront and become honest with this reality matters, and it becomes the only way we have into ultimately justifying what we believe and why through the tools of logic. 

And in case it’s not evident, any kids film that is dealing with such subjects in such a way deserves to be praised. For me it hit on so many levels important to my own journey, being one who has long wrestled with our (human) relationship to the whole of life, and as someone who continues to critique a failure in the modern West to take death seriously. Most of all, even if you disagree with the film’s conclusions, it teaches us how understanding and being able to articulate what we believe and why is a worthwhile and necessary endeavour. Such things are found in both the deconstruction and reconstruction, a process that can be afforded to both young and old. To this end, as the film suggests, what is true about this world and our lives matters because it informs the ways we participate in it. It is in fact our lives in the face of the reality of death that become the grounds for the necessary justification. 

Now if only Rian Johnson had watched this film first. 

And one last note- the scene where the sheep is making his best attempt to describe the church is hands down one of the best and funniest sequences I’ve seen in a long time.