Film Review – The Sheep Detectives

A pastoral setting. A farmland looked over by a tough but secretly tender sheepherder. A collection of talking animals trying to understand the horrors that face them while enjoying light play in the open world. Surely another sequel to 1995’s “Babe” is here! “The Sheep Detectives” isn’t another chapter in the aborted franchise, with screenwriter Craig Mazin (“Scary Movie 3,” “The Huntsman: Winter’s War”) out to make sense of author Leonie Swann’s 2005 novel, “Three Bags Full.” The book was a dark take on the cartoon premise of sheep out to solve the murder of their handler, putting Mazin to work softening up the source material, tasked with making it a bit more palatable for family audiences. Kyle Balda makes his live-action directorial debut with “The Sheep Detectives” after a lifetime spent in the world of animation (helming hits such as “Minions” and “Despicable Me 3”), and he’s presented with quite a tonal challenge here, out to balance the gentleness of the CGI characters with the general menace of the human world. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com