I’ve always been drawn to stories about underdogs who get swept into situations far beyond their abilities. The only way out is through, which usually means failing forward and depending on each other until something like a family forms. The Minions are perfect examples of that kind of misfit energy, and I encountered something similar when I first read The Sheep Detectives.
At its core, it’s a mystery: a group of sheep try to solve the murder of their beloved shepherd. They are completely without a clue, literally, about how totally unequipped they are for it. That’s right up my street. But what moved me about this particular group of misfits went far beyond the external stakes. It was how unprepared they were to overcome the internal stakes of processing the grief of losing somebody without erasing them from memory–a feeling that I had some firsthand experience with.
I was 23 when my mother died. It was sudden. Life was moving along as usual and then a week later, she was gone. My family dealt with it in their own ways … or didn’t. Some time later, I was on the phone with my sister, and I asked how she was doing. “As good as can be expected considering what day it is,” she said. It was the one year anniversary of our mother’s death and I had completely forgotten. I felt like a monster.
It woke me up to the fact that I had somehow found a way to skip forward without ever really going through it. It took a full year, but that was the moment I think I truly started to grieve. When I read this script, I immediately recognized that instinct to forget.
Anytime something uncomfortable happens, no matter how small, the sheep do a countdown ritual to wipe it clean from their memory. This is understandably tempting, until they decide to forget their shepherd entirely just so they don’t have to feel the pain of his passing. We realize, even if they don’t, that they’ve faced death many times before without ever grieving it.
Mopple, voiced beautifully by Chris O’Dowd, is the only sheep who can’t forget. He carries all of it, the good and the bad, and he talks about remembering his mother’s face. That was the moment it hit me. The idea that even though remembering hurts, it’s also what keeps the people you love alive.
Some of the most important life lessons I learned as a kid happened inside a movie theater. The film that taught me about death was The Champ . I was exactly the same age as little Ricky Schroder was when he begged Champ to “Wake up!” It was emotional and raw and didn’t give eight-year-old me a way to process what I was feeling, it just made me feel it. To this day, I still can’t watch that scene without becoming a total mess.
What I responded to when I read Craig Mazin’s script, and what ultimately made me want to make this film, was where it goes after that moment. What do we do with those feelings once they’re there? And how best to explore these questions with family audiences, especially in a way kids could connect to? In my experience, the answer has a lot to do with how the story is told.
‘Sheep Detectives’ filmmaker Kyle Balda and actor Nicholas Braun
Alex Bailey/Amazon Content Services
Comedy is a kind of language. It lets heavier themes come through without leaving you feeling hopeless. Laughter gives you a way to sit with something difficult instead of turning away from it, helps you metabolize it more easily.
There was a moment during the early days of the pandemic when everything non-essential dropped out. The focus shifted to what was urgent and necessary, so a lot of what we thought of as entertainment started to feel like a luxury. It made you question what you were doing, whether Minions movies mattered at all when everything else was so dire. One of the artists I worked with told me she felt guilty for making an animated film when there were people risking their lives to save others at the hospital. And she wasn’t alone.
But then we started getting messages from frontline medical workers about our films.
“All I wanted to do after an eighteen-hour shift was laugh.”
“It was the first time I’d smiled in days.”
That’s when I realized: these characters were reaching people in a deeper way than I expected—providing a bit of levity in truly difficult moments. What we were doing may not be saving lives, but it could offer some relief to the people who were … or to anyone going through a hard time.
Joseph Campbell, the famed mythologist who studied storytelling patterns, said it pretty directly: stories are equipment for living. They give us ways to interpret situations and deal with life, often without us realizing it.
I didn’t have a story quite like The Sheep Detectives when I was a kid. I hope this movie makes audiences laugh, but much more than that I hope it gives families a space to talk about death in a way that isn’t scary, and show that you can process it together. Because, as much as it might hurt, it’s a gift to be able to remember your mother’s face.
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Kyle Balda is a filmmaker whose credits include Minions, Despicable Me 3, Minions: The Rise of Gru and The Sheep Detectives.