The Sheep Detectives

“The real world is more complex than in books.” Had you told me that a film about a flock of anthropomorphised sheep solving the murder of their shepherd would invoke the likes of Immanuel Kant and David Hume in its overarching narrative, I would likely have met the same fate as Chrysippus upon witnessing a donkey devour his figs. Yet, to my genuine bewilderment, one of the more vital messages for the contemporary youth has emerged from the unlikeliest of places. The Sheep Detectives ultimately provide perhaps the clearest popular illustration of Kantian epistemology that I have encountered (be it intentional or not). The film juxtaposes Sebastian’s hardened empiricism with Lilly’s rational and imaginative capacities in order to demonstrate, in a distinctly Kantian sense, that neither faculty is sufficient in isolation. Experience without imagination risks producing a narrow minded adaptation, whilst rationality detached from experience risks producing abstraction without moral substance. In bridging this divide, the film recalls Hume’s belief that literature and cultivated sentiment disclose moral truths inaccessible to rationality or experience alone as ways of knowing. The result is an unexpectedly prescient and somewhat Deleuzian epistemological vision that promotes a return to memory, narrative, and imagination as key methods of understanding the world and how to act within it. Methods that have, for far too long, been dismissed as a symptom of escapism to be cured. In this rhetorical sense, the world is not at all “more complex” than it appears in books. To presume otherwise on the basis of experience or rational calculation alone is to deny oneself the clarity afforded by what Hume understood as the cultivation of the passions. Or, put simply, to condemn oneself to living an incomplete life with no ability to see the world with any degree of fullness or nuance. To loosely quote Jaques Derrida “There is nothing outside the text.” - Derrida, Of Grammatology While I can’t speak much to its technical qualities, I can certainly tip my hat to its unabashed simplicity and brilliant illustration of crucially important lessons for both its youth audience and western cinema at large. But perhaps the key takeaway is far more simple… “If there's one secret to happiness in my life, it's taking care of the kindest creatures on Earth, sheep!” In any case, well played sheep detectives, well played indeed. References: Derrida, J. (1967). Of Grammatology. The Johns Hopkins University Press. Giroux, H. A. (2020). On critical pedagogy. Bloomsbury Academic, An Imprint Of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Hume, D. (1748). An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. Clarendon Press. Hume, D. (2004). A Treatise of Human Nature. Penguin UK. (Original work published 1739) Kant, I. (1781). The Critique of Pure Reason. Penguin Classics.