Last week, TNMN community members from all around the world submitted their favorite movie cameos. Now you can see every submission, and decide whose is the best.

When their shepherd is found dead, a flock of sheep set out to solve his murder.

→ Mystery solving. It’s a family-friendly Knives Out. Get your detective hats on, people.

→ Anthropomorphized sheep. TNMN is an especially safe space for oddly-specific interests. If you’re into anthropomorphized sheep, this is the movie for you. This and, maybe, Zootopia. But you know you like it better when the sheep look lifelike. Cartoonish sheep will never do it for you.

→ Watching movies with grandma. Actually, we watched The Sheep Detectives with four generations (us, our kids, mother, and grandmother). Perhaps the film’s greatest accomplishment: we were all mesmerized. Once the murderer was revealed, my grandmother, indignant, leaped out of her seat and shouted, “Now who in the world could have guessed that?” Right on, grandma, right on.

My son, wife, and I are on a movie binge. We’re going back to the classics (our classics). Films released before every family flick was voice acting and animation. Before they started remaking movies within a decade of releasing the originals (ahem).

Jurassic Park, Jumanji, Hook, Rookie of the Year. Back to the Future. The films that remind us of childhood.

We’re watching these for fun. But also because I have a trivial fear that hasn’t come up in therapy yet (I have a long backlog of trivial complaints to work through.)

Here it is, my fear: my son, niece, and nephew will lead childhoods entirely devoid of imaginative family cinema. Things are in a state of disrepair. Family movies with inspired scripts and orchestral scores and actual characters are a thing of the past. The industry instead favors overstimulation and loud noises and remakes of movies that have no business being remade, other than business itself.

The Sheep Detectives is proof that I’m wrong. The film made quick work of my family. Four generations, each laughing and gasping and mystery-solving as one.

Here is exactly sort of proof I needed. Here is a reminder that family cinema can still be captivating and silly and a little bit dark. Here is evidence that it can still make us believe in the impossible, and have positively arresting emotional depth.

A fact or two about the production that makes you say "oh, neat."

→ The film was written by Craig Mazin, acclaimed writer of heartwarming family favorites like Chernobyl and The Last of Us. Mazin adapted Leonie Swann’s novel, Three Bags Full, 10 years ago. The script sat dormant until MGM revived it. Also, I'm aware Chernobyl and The Last of Us are not family entertainment. Laugh a little, damn it.

→ Hugh Jackman didn’t act opposite a tennis ball. His words: “I've done a lot of movies where I've acted opposite tennis balls…but we didn't have that…I was acting actually opposite a puppet that looked incredibly alive and real and honestly, to my eye, it was literally like a sheep is talking to me now. It was extraordinary.”

→ The production toured UK farms to effectively design the flock. VFX supervisor Graham Page’s words: “I started going to all the different farms around the UK, looking at rare-breeds farms and different breeds that could become different sheep, breeds that had different characteristics that could convey something unique to each character.”