No one should bother doing knockoffs of the beloved "Babe" movies of the 1990s. Those Australian classics have a storybook charm that is probably unmatchable, and any crass attempt to replicate it would surely make talking-pig devotees very grumpy.

That said, however, a new English movie called "The Sheep Detectives," which takes for its own loquacious livestock a flock of the woolly ruminants of the title, has a warm and somewhat complex appeal that's very much its own. This is because, along with rendering its characters at a new peak of puppetry and digital animation, it also draws on the English country house mysteries created in the last century by such writers as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers.

Here, the mystery at hand is the death of an amiable shepherd named George Hardy (Hugh Jackman), who presided over his own flock in the grassy hills of the South of England. George lived alone in an Airstream trailer on his property near the cozy village of Denbrook, which is peopled by such familiar archetypes as a bumbling policeman (Nicholas Braun, of "Succession"), a nosy innkeeper (Hong Chau, "Wuthering Heights"), and a gruff butcher (Conleth Hill, who played Lord Varys on "Game of Thrones").

For company, George had only his sheep, to whom he would read vintage crime novels in the evenings. While we can hear the sheep speaking to one another (in the voices of Patrick Stewart, Bryan Cranston, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, among others), they can't be heard by the humans around them, and so George has no idea how hooked they've become on the whodunits he's inadvertently schooled them in. Thus, when his dead body is found outside his trailer one morning, and the local constabulary shrugs off his passing as only mildly mysterious, the sheep trot right into action, armed with the crime-novel methodology they've absorbed from their departed master.

They know, for example, that something about the victim will be key in determining his murderer. Also, that at some point in the investigation, there must be a meeting of all the characters, among whom will be the killer. Viewers well-marinated in this sort of lore will nod their heads in appreciation.

George's murder draws complications like iron filings to a magnet. It turns out he has two kids who were long ago given up for adoption, one a daughter who lives in America, the other a son who resides in South Africa. In addition, there was also someone paying him a visit on the night he died (two half-empty glasses of whiskey were found on a table in his trailer). Also stirring the pot is a young reporter for the local gazette (Nicholas Galitzine) and an interloping attorney (Emma Thompson), who reveals that George had quietly made millions on the stock market over the years and rewrote his will just days before he died.

So whodunit indeed? The story functions pretty well as an actual mystery that requires some actual figuring out. And the movie's splendid digital rendering (mostly by the production houses Framestore and Clear Angle, which also worked on "Barbie," "Avatar," and "Dune") adds a modicum of warmth to the imagery (especially in scenes like the closeup of George fondly tousling the noggin of one of his cottony charges).

The picture should be a good emotional fit for many kids — it handles issues of loss and grief and violence with grace, and deals with spirituality in a touching way. The sheep believe that when one of their number expires, they ascend into the sky to become clouds. When one of the flock learns that this is actually not the case, that the loss is permanent, his puzzlement is gently moving. "Dead?" he says. "Is that real?"

Photos courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios