Zirri - Das Wolkenschaf (1993)

Christine, nicknamed Schiene, lives in a big city on Tree Street, where not a single tree grows. She has 13 mice and stressed-out parents who are glad when Schiene goes to stay with her grandmother for the holidays. Her grandmother lives in the countryside, rides in a horse-drawn wagon, and can stand on her head. Grandpa, meanwhile, is a shepherd. The rural idyll in the small town is disturbed only by the schnapps manufacturer, who is always smoking and drives a vehicle whose exhaust fumes, like the chimneys of the schnapps factory, pollute the air with black cloud-sheep. When she arrives, Schiene sees a white cloud-sheep fall from the sky. A little later, she sees the sheep again, and it introduces itself as Zirri. The black sheep had pushed it off the Milky Way, where Zirri had been playing with other sheep friends, because it did not want to take a nap. Now Zirri is alone on Earth and fears it will not survive here for long. Schiene tells her grandmother, Grandpa, and the livestock vet, but none of them knows what to do. The circus performer is called Sky-Helga simply because she performs on a trapeze, and the small town’s chimneys are too low for the helpful chimney sweep to assist the little sheep on its journey back to the sky. In the end, the local fire brigade helps: they extend their longest ladder toward the sky. When the fire chief turns out to be afraid of heights, the livestock vet eventually climbs all the way to the top of the ladder. The attacking black cloud-sheep, which try to push him off the ladder, are driven away by the town’s children, who set a nearby windmill in motion and use it to blow the black sheep away. Zirri manages to leap into the sky from the last rung of the ladder and promises Schiene that it will visit her from time to time—in treeless Tree Street, as rain.