It’s right there in the title, folks.

The Sheep Detectives comes to us from director Kyle Balda (late of the Despicable Me franchise, of all things) and screenwriter Craig Mazin (writer/creator/exec producer of goddamn “Chernobyl”!), under the exec-producing wings of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (How many times have you seen Project Hail Mary by now?). And this motley assortment of proven talents is loosely adapting “Three Bags Full”, a 2005 novel from the German author Leonie Swann… which is literally a murder mystery solved by a flock of sheep.

It’s an idea so crazy, it just might turn out to be amazing. Let’s take it from the top.

We lay our scene in the sleepy rural British town of Denbrook, the kind of place where everyone goes to church and yet the collection plate is filled with loose change and postage stamps. The Denbrook Cultural Fair is going on, and the banner is literally larger than the fair itself. Everyone knows each other and everyone’s up in each other’s business or holding a vendetta against each other. That’s the kind of town we’re dealing with here.

Luckily, George Hardy (Hugh Jackman) has the good sense not to bother with those yokels any more than he has to. George is a shepherd, happily tending to his flock in a meadow just outside of town. Much as George loves his sheep, he’s also a huge murder mystery buff, to such an extent that he reads murder mystery novels to his flock before going to bed every night.

The plot kicks off in a big way when George is found dead outside his trailer home. What’s worse, the local cop (Officer Tim Derry, played by Nicholas Braun) is an ignoramus too young and stupid to handle an actual murder. Because, remember, he was hired to be the token police officer in a town of maybe a dozen people where nothing ever happens!

The suspects are as follows.

• Caleb Merrow (Tosin Cole), another local shepherd and George’s business rival
• Ham Gilyard (Conleth Hill), the butcher, whom George hated for obvious reasons
• Beth Pennock (Hong Chau), the innkeeper, who seems peculiarly nosy with regard to George’s personal life
• Reverend Hillcoate (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith), who had some kind of unfinished business with George
• Rebecca Hampstead (Molly Gordon), George’s enigmatic American penpal, who just happened to fly into England at roughly the same time of his murder.

We’ve also got Lydia Harbottle (Emma Thompson, of all people), George’s lawyer, who comes in to serve as the executor of George’s will and thus explain the possible motive. Last but not least is Elliot Matthews (He-Man himself, Nicholas Galitzine), a young up-and-coming reporter who tried to make a name for himself reporting on the aforementioned “cultural fair” only to stumble into a murder mystery. Are either of them — or Officer Derry — potential suspects? Who can say?

Which brings us to our flock of sleuths.

There are of course a number of various sheep with all sorts of personality tics. While a select few among them each get a brief moment to directly impact the plot, the sheep are all primarily there to serve as background comic relief. But there are still three or four worth mentioning.

Lily (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is quickly singled out as George’s favorite of the flock. She’s the brains of the operation, the most attentive at listening to George’s nighttime stories, and the most accomplished at solving the fictional murders ahead of the big reveal. This is our de facto protagonist. But even she has her limits.

See, like most other sheep, Lily is a soft and docile creature who doesn’t cope well with hardship. None of George’s flock have ever been outside the meadow, they’ve never dealt with any humans who weren’t George (or Caleb, when he passes through), they’ve never even set hoof on anything that wasn’t grass or clover. Thus we have Sebastian (Bryan Cranston), a dark and imposing stray ram who comes and goes as he pleases. He’s there to help guide our sleuths through the strange and terrible land of freaking Denbrook, while also serving as a darkly cynical counterpoint to Lily’s determined optimism.

Then we’ve got Mopple (Chris O’Dowd), primarily notable for a birth defect that cursed him with a photographic memory. This is particularly noteworthy because in the world of this movie, sheep have the singular gift of selective amnesia. They can instantly and completely forget things at will. This feeds back into the central premise that sheep live in a perpetual state of blissful ignorance and comfort, because they can — and instinctively, instantly, collectively do — forget any kind of painful memory.

Just like all the other sheep, Lily’s never had to deal with any kind of trauma. She’s never had to confront any kind of harsh truth. But if she’s going to solve George’s murder and make his life and death worth anything, she’s going to have to learn how. She might even have to achieve the impossible task of teaching the other sheep how. It’s heartbreakingly difficult work, but luckily for her, Mopple is exceedingly well-practiced at carrying trauma. And a photographic memory comes in handy for solving murders, too.

And I’d be remiss not to mention the anonymous Winter Lamb, voiced by Tommy Birchall. Something else about sheep culture in this picture is that all the sheep freaking hate lambs born in winter. It’s never explained why, but every sheep in the flock makes a clear and consistent point of staying away from the Winter Lamb and making it perfectly clear he’ll never be properly welcome. Naturally, this means that Winter Lamb is ideally placed to see things and do things that nobody ever thinks to take seriously until it’s finally time to play that wild card.

I could keep going and list all the other sheep in this picture (including the elder statesman voiced by Sir Patrick Fucking Stewart), but I’d be talking too much. The bottom line is, we’ve got a story about sheep — famously animals too helpless and stupid to be capable of any independent thought or action — coming together to solve a murder. At the same time, they cope with themes of death and trauma in the course of processing the death of their beloved shepherd and the harsh realization that no, sheep do not actually get to live forever as clouds in the sky.

On the one hand, the sheep have a distinct advantage in that they can go pretty much anywhere in this podunk town of ignorant morons without drawing much attention. On the other hand, the sheep have no working digits, they can’t talk to humans, and they have no legal authority. Thus the sheep have to find new and creative ways of working with Officer Derry — who, remember, is the most pathetically inept cop in all of fiction since Wade freaking Whipple — leading him by the nose and literally drawing him pictures to get him on board.

This is a film in which a flock of sheep have to teach a sworn police officer how to solve a murder. That is literally the premise of this movie.

So, are there any nitpicks? Well, the script has some problems. Most notably, there’s the overlong expository voice-over, in which George helpfully and exhaustively tells us literally everything we need to know about the town, the citizens, and the sheep right up front. Potentially even worse, we’ve got a scene in which George’s ghost shows up just in time to give Lily a pep talk and the last missing piece of inspiration. Both are classic signs of crappy storytelling. Both are also signs of filmmakers desperately trying to get the most out of their most bankable star, after hiring him to get killed off half an hour in.

The other big problem pertains to Officer Derry. The guy must be doing something right when he’s offscreen, because there are multiple times when he’s clueless in one scene, then he’s got some revelatory piece of evidence in the next scene, and we skip right over the part where he makes the actual discovery. Granted, those missing scenes aren’t major enough to take away from the overall mystery. Even so, it’s bad form for a detective story to leave out so much detective work. Especially considering how Officer Derry’s development arc from a hapless dolt to an accomplished crimefighter is such a central part of this film.

Overall, The Sheep Detectives is silly and funny and stupid in the kind of intelligent way that could only be done in the style of British humor. It’s a heartfelt, uplifting, delightfully humorous comedy while also working as a damned effective murder mystery caper. Of course it certainly helps that the live-action cast and the voice actors are all playing to the cheap seats, and the creature effects are all aces. The sheep look just realistic enough to sell the stakes and the character drama, yet just cartoonish enough to sell the ludicrous nature of the plot and premise.

I had a wonderful time with this one. Absolutely recommended.