One glance at the poster for The Sheep Detectives is enough to fill one’s soul with dread. All those celebrities voicing CG sheep? From one of the Minions directors? Surely this project will be to whodunits what G-Force was to spy movies: “cute” animals, fart jokes, and weak pop culture references.

And yet! In a twist worthy of a great Agatha Christie movie, it isn’t torturous at all to watch. Rather than conjuring up memories of Alvin and the Chipmunks or 2011’s The Smurfs, it instead harkens back to witty, wordplay-driven British comedies of yore. It’s also deeply poignant, to boot. The Sheep Detectives is the biggest family movie surprise since Paddington.

George Hardy (Hugh Jackman) loves his sheep. A kindly shepherd living near the eccentric town of Denbrook, he spends his days tending to his flock. He bestows each with their own name and winds down every day by reading them detective stories. They, in turn, love him and his yarns. Lily (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) especially prides herself on solving every one long before anyone else in the flock has a clue. It’s a good life for man and woolly beast on this farm.

That is until tragedy strikes. One night Lily and her best pal Mopple (Chris O’Dowd) come upon George’s corpse, murdered. With local humans like doofus policeman Tim Derry (Nicholas Braun) not taking the crime seriously, it’s time for a whodunnit of their own. Determined to solve the slaying. Lily steps up and encourages the rest of the flock to join her, much to the dubious amusement of the cynical, worldly ram Sebastian (Bryan Cranston). Unlikely heroes or not, surely, all those Agatha Christie and Kate Atkinson books fostered some crime-solving skills in the ewes and bucks.

As adapted by Craig Mazin, the PG-rated script is, bizarrely, his big-screen work to evoke his bleak, decidedly more adult HBO properties like Chernobyl and The Last of Us. As with those, the writing is focused on the importance of uncovering the truth, no matter how emotionally unbearable it may seem. “The real world is a lot more complicated than a detective book,” Sebastian imparts to Lily and Mopple early on in their journey. Such complications lend the feature solid emotional grounding.

Speaking of emotions, it’s remarkable how deeply moving The Sheep Detectives is given its director’s past filmography. In his previous Illumination works, Kyle Balda favored loud, broad slapstick, often performed by yellow pill-shaped creatures screeching about bananas. When tasked with executing Mazin’s script here, however, he steps up his game. Over and over, he realizes the most poignant segments with skill and restraint. For instance, when Lily and Mopple discover George’s body, the film slows to let the scene breathe both visually and tonally. Rather than reach for a gag or melodrama, Balda sits with the characters and the audience in that sadness.

Balda and Mazin eschew the temptation to call attention to the film’s pathos with tons of wooden expository dialogue. So many modern family films seem not to trust their audience, especially the children, to grasp what’s happening, leading to characters reciting their arcs while pointing out how viewers should feel and when. Despite some clumsy first-act board setting to lay out the narrative chess pieces, The Sheep Detectives largely dodges this trap. Instead, it goes about it in a way more comparable to Up’s “Married Life” opener, giving tiny gestures and still moments the power to call forth the waterworks. The choice wisely evokes the flock’s fragmented understanding of the wider world. In lieu of soliloquies, the likes of Sebastian must use piecemeal phrasing to describe their discomfort or past anguish. The results are effectively heartbreaking.

Don’t think the film is all weeping and sadness, though. On the contrary, it functions dandily as a sturdy all-ages comedy, a yukfest unafraid of subtle background gags or genuinely witty wordplay. The sheep character designs also work wonders in creating hearty laughs. Of all people, Seth MacFarlane once noted the importance of simplified character designs, arguing Ted’s two black dots eyes allowed audiences to interpret more. That sparseness was funnier than excessive detail. Similarly, images of Lily and Mopple staring, tilting their heads, or standing in spaces where they don’t belong traffic in similar sparseness. There’s something so intrinsically amusing about staring into a vacant sheep face.

It also fosters a bond between the audience and the subject. The visual simplicity renders the flock immediately endearing. Contrasted with, say, the uncanny valley of 2019’s The Lion King’s critters, the sheep here achieve incredible facial expressiveness that evokes recognizable vulnerability. If you’ve ever driven past a farm and excitedly pointed out “sheep!” upon seeing them in the distance, you’ll fall head over heels for these domesticated, ruminant mammals.

Despite all these positives, The Sheep Detectives does have hiccups. Mazin’s script, tragically, can’t avoid some self-referential lines that run too close to “well, that happened!” for comfort. Additionally, as richly as it paints its animal leads, the human supporting performers, like Emma Thompson—even while rocking an awesome purple costume and tossing out killer comic lines—and Hong Chau feel a bit short-changed.

Where it counts, though, The Sheep Detectives proves shockingly entertaining. Normally, assembling famous faces to voice CG sheep obsessed with clues creates something akin to the next Show Dogs. Instead, Louis-Dreyfus is impressively engaging as Lily, while Cranston excels in delivering tormented work as Sebastian. As a result, the movie stands toe-to-toe with other great British comedies like the earliest Edgar Wright movies. I’m not pulling the wool over your eyes here. This feature’s charms are hard to bleat.

The Sheep Detectives hoofs it into theaters everywhere on May 8.

The Sheep Detectives Trailer: