Something of an anomaly in the age of multi-screen households and fragmented viewing, the genuine all-ages family movie gets a canny but uncynical revival in “The Sheep Detectives.” As bracingly odd a proposition to hit the multiplex as any we’ve seen in the last couple of years, the first live-action feature from long-serving Illumination director Kyle Balda (“Despicable Me 3,” “Minions: The Rise of Gru”) is a shaggy hybrid of creature feature and murder mystery that — minus the zippy anthropomorphic world-building of the “Zootopia” films — derives much of its charm and wit from the frank incompatibility of those genres.
Here, sheep can’t solve crimes until human incompetence forces them to step into the breach; though pushed for the purposes of fantasy, the limits of animal intelligence are a poignant factor in the tale. “The Sheep Detectives” won’t seem quite so out of left field to any of the legions of adult readers who made German author Leonie Swann’s cozy crime novel “Three Bags Full” an unlikely global bestseller 20 years ago. Mordantly comic and somehow not overly whimsical, its tale of a motley flock in rural Ireland ruminating on the grisly death of their shepherd was plainly cinematic, but not so plainly commercial: Easier to swallow on the page, the absurdities of its sheep’s-eye-view storytelling are potentially harder to wrangle on screen.
