The Sheep Detectives #triggerwarning!

I appreciate that all my blogs seem to be prompted by watching children’s films. This is partly because, as a mother of three, that’s just my life right now. But it is also because children's films seem uniquely capable of seeping into your emotions and delving into your imagination far deeper than most films aimed at adults (or maybe I’ve just stopped watching adult films altogether at this stage in my life!) I didn't want to write this post after having moaned in a previous blog about the overuse of this particular word, but I have only one thing to say here: #triggered. I actually can’t tell whether it triggered me in a good or a bad way, so here I am, trying to write down my thoughts.

I went to watch The Sheep Detectives because my eldest two were watching Star Wars, and this was the only appropriately aged film available for my five-year-old. I’d researched whether there were any scary parts for a child her age, and from my Googling, I deduced that she would be just fine. I didn't Google whether I would be fine. I wish I had.

The story seems simple enough. A farmer is murdered, and his sheep use the clues around them to solve a classic whodunnit, using the skills they learned from their farmer, who used to read them detective stories every evening. We can understand what the sheep are saying, and they get into some fun adventures trying to work out who did it. Cute, right? But it all gets a bit complicated when you realise the farmer had two adopted children, and the flock starts to believe that one of them committed the murder for the inheritance. It gets even more complicated when, alongside this, there is a winter lamb who has been abandoned by his flock because nobody wants to take him in. Because, well, that’s just the way it is.

Now, I can tell you categorically that an adopted person did not write this story. I don't even think an adopted person was spoken to when they wrote it. The adopted child possibly being the murderer didn't surprise me in itself. It fits a classic mystery storyline, and as it's a predictable pattern that movies always use, I could see it coming. It was the winter sheep that pulled the actual trigger. The winter sheep storyline was clearly supposed to parallel the adoption story, to link the idea that abandoned children who don't belong to a tribe feel like outcasts and might do awful things. They just look from afar at what they could have had in a family. For me, that one was a bit much for a PG, a bit much for a 42!

I didn’t know what I was feeling while I was sitting there in the dark, it was all a bit muddly and complex. But there was a part at the end that completely ripped out my heart and jumped all over it. The finale of the film saw them establish who the real culprit was, I won’t ruin that for you, but then the flock all walked back home together, happy to be a family again. The little winter lamb excitedly tried to join them, but they just walked off. I know this part was constructed purely to pull on the audience's heartstrings, but my heartstrings didn't need any more pulling. They’d been tugged for the last ninety minutes. The flock didn’t even notice the little lamb wasn’t right behind them. And the lamb didn’t even try to push his way in, because, despite having just worked together so beautifully to solve the mystery, he didn’t believe he was good enough to be accepted.

This is what it truly feels like: to know that you could fit in, but to completely lack the belief that you should, could, or would be accepted. The older winter sheep in the story was never accepted either. He never even told the flock he was a winter sheep because he feared what would happen. In the movie, it's all resolved in the final minutes. They let the little lamb in, and he’s suddenly happy to jump around with them, implying that this is what he wanted all along and now everything is fixed. But it’s not as easy as that. They actively shunned him, never asking any questions about why the way it was had to be so cruel. In reality, a child or a sheep in that position would eventually stop trying to belong. They’d give up. They’d become like the older winter sheep, gazing longingly from a cliff, forever on the outside looking in.

I don’t really know whether I’m saying this movie was good or bad. I’m saying it was clumsy because of my own clumsy, complicated response to it. I didn’t like the way it dumped too much heavy stuff on the screen all at once, especially since the original books didn't even pack the winter sheep and the detective plot into the same story. When I sit with it, I realise there are so many layers to why I'm unsettled. Maybe I’m annoyed that popular media continues to sensationalise adoption, or that it triggered that deep, systemic feeling that you’re always a little bit of an outcast no matter what you do if you’re adopted. Maybe I’m annoyed that I didn’t realise the film was going to touch on adoption at all, leaving me completely unprepared, or that this innocent little sheep had to experience such a rubbish, rejecting beginning just because of when he was born. Maybe I'm just annoyed that wrapping a story up in a neat little bow isn’t how reality works.

And maybe I’m annoyed at how the film handled another one of its big themes, which was the sheep's ability to just conveniently forget things that felt too difficult to remember. Granted, by the end of the film, the sheep do have a grand realisation and discover that actually, remembering the sad stuff is just as important and helpful as remembering the good stuff. As an attachment practitioner, I recognise that as a massive, beautiful concept. It is entirely relevant to how adopted kids process trauma, integrate their pasts, and move away from defence mechanisms like avoidance and dissociation. But my problem is that this movie was not pitched as a therapeutic support tool for adopted families. You cannot just casually drop profound, heavy, life-altering concepts about developmental trauma into a PG movie wrapped in fluffy cartoon wool and then just roll the credits. If a movie is going to delve that deep into the mechanics of emotional survival, it needs to come with a warning label, and it possibly needs a therapy session afterwards to unpack it all!

And maybe, most of all, I’m annoyed that I, a lot of the time now, conveniently forget that I'm adopted. This stuff just comes along and reminds me of it all over again, right when I least expect it. It just seems like a lot to wrap up in a film about some detective sheep. It clumsily brought up so much, and maybe I should have Googled it first. But if a film about sheep can make me feel all of this, it only proves how deeply those feelings of belonging, memory, and rejection sit just beneath the surface for so many of us. There's a whole flock of winter sheep hoping for imposter syndrome to just pack up and leave. Maybe it would be easier to just forget????