The Other Side of Animation 73: Sing Review

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Spoiler Warning/Parental Heads up: I will be spoiling this movie in its entirety to bring up some points about the problems Illumination has. Then again, the trailers already ruined the plots and endings to many of the characters in their advertising, so I don’t feel too bad spoiling it.



To me, I shoot from the hip, in terms of how I feel about animation studios. I will praise and support a film that is good and has great elements to talk about, but I will not hold back if there is something bad, or worth criticizing. I won’t fully label a company with their pros and cons in some witty phrase or quote, but I’m going to mention when a film doesn’t work for me on a personal level. That’s why I’m so willing to praise and criticize Illumination Entertainment. They are obviously super-talented, and have a lot of great or entertaining ideas, but they either don’t go all the way with them, or the writers or storytellers don’t branch out enough in terms of making a unpredictable or messy story. This is true with their newest movie Sing. It’s definitely a very entertaining movie, but you get the feeling that they could have done a bit more, and changed a few things to make it an even better bit of harmless fun entertainment. Let’s pick out our favorite songs and find out what I like and don’t like about Garth Jennings’ Sing.



The story revolves around a Koala theater owner named Buster Moon, voiced by Matthew McConaughey. He is unfortunately not raking in the dough, and is in danger of being bought out by the bank. As a last resort, he decides to hold a singing competition, with a thousand dollar prize. Unfortunately due to a typo caused by his secretary, the fliers say $100K, and of course catches the attention of the entire city. After a slew of auditions that range in quality and song choice, the finalists are chosen. They include a Frank Sinatra-style mouse named Mike, voiced by Seth MacFarlane, a punk rock porcupine named Ash, voiced by Scarlett Johansson, a shy teenage elephant named Meena, voiced by Tori Kelly, Rosita, an overworked pig mother of 25 kids, voiced by Reese Witherspoon, Johnny, a gorilla who is the son of a crime lord voiced by Taron Egerton, and Gunther, an eccentric German pig voiced by Nick Kroll. Who will win, and can Buster find the money to save the theater? Well, you have all probably seen the movie, so you draw your own conclusion.



So, I brought up in the opening paragraph that Illumination has great potential in their film ideas, but essentially don’t fully take advantage of them. How does that work here? Well, easy. Due to how many characters there are, their stories either feel incomplete or really rushed. Like, there could have been so much more to these story arcs if they did a couple of different things. The first change I would make would be to make the movie longer. Maybe two hours would have been nice, since then you could give characters time to breath and talk, and not just play out their character arcs away from each other. The second change would to have the characters interact more. A lot of the crucial character moments in this film are happening when the individual characters are alone. Why couldn’t they put these characters more in the same room, or work off one another? You have some great talent here, but there is only really one real scene where some of the characters interact with each other. For about 90% of the film, they are not in the same room together. Why would you do that? Why not have them in the same room and have their arcs interact with one another? It would save screentime. It also doesn’t help when you have a character like Buster Moon. For me, Buster flip-flopped between being likable, and a crummy individual. Now, I didn’t get this impression from the trailers or marketing, but I was hoping he would be like Professor Harold Hill from The Music Man and less like a seedy individual. At times he really wants to make this whole singing competition work, but a lot of his screentime is spent begging for money, stealing, and trying to forcefully change contestants who are good with one genre of music to sing a different type. His story was not the most interesting one out of the six or so that were going on. I was more invested with Johnny or Rosita more so than Buster.



It also hurts going into the movie that you know what’s going to happen. It’s not even just the fact that the advertising showed off so much that you were left with the meh and boring sequences to look forward to. Each character’s story is very predictable, and even if the advertising didn’t ruin it for you, you know what will happen with everyone’s story. Having familiar story elements are fine, but if you don’t put a twist to them or execute them to be interesting, then nothing will be surprising. If I know what’s going to happen, then why should I watch your movie? It’s always a big problem with studios like Illumination, since you can tell they put a huge amount of money into the animation, comedy, and marketing, but not into their scripts and stories. I want to be super-supportive for newer studios or studios with obviously amazing talent, but I’m going to be critical of them when other studios, big and small, are doing much better work. Oh, and speaking of comedy, a lot of people have mentioned this and I am too, but this has quite possibly the worst fart joke I have ever seen in any animated film. It’s out of nowhere, doesn’t even fit the tone of the scene, and it’s probably the most forced fart joke that has ever been put in an animated film. Luckily, this kind of humor only pops up once, but it’s so notorious that it does affect the overall experience, due to how distracting it is.



So, I must not like this movie huh? Well, no. I actually do like the movie. It has a lot of great positives that at the very least push it above Illumination’s other blockbuster hit, The Secret Life of Pets. While the characters are tropes, I did find them very likable and endearing, which helped because of some great actors that are behind the characters. I don’t know if it was because they were super-invested in their roles or the person in charge of their performances, but everyone did a great job. While the film does use a couple of modern songs that are painfully distracting and pandering, they only pop up here or there, and the majority of the songs are pretty good. I also give the film kudos that like DreamWorks’ Trolls, they chose actors who can sing and act, and not one or the other. I mean, when you have someone like Seth MacFarlane, you are in good hands in terms of someone who can do both. I also like that they actually wrote some original songs for the film. Granted, one of the three original songs plays at the end, and the other two are mostly sung by Scarlet’s character, but still. Everyone did a great job with their singing moments. The performances were entertaining, and personally, as an individual that watches stuff like The Voice, I got a huge kick out of how Buster talked to some of the contestants, since it was eerily similar to how some of the judges on The Voice work. I know that is a niche bit of enjoyment, but that’s just me.



The animation is also nice. The humanoid animal designs are great and appealing to look at. Sure, the world they inhabit isn’t as wildly creative as Zootopia, but it’s decent, and unlike Zootopia, they use more than just mammals for the townsfolk. Granted, they rarely show up, but still.



So, yeah, while this film is incredibly flawed, I still had a solid time with it. Sure, Sing could have been much better than a feel-good time waster, but for what it does do, it’s good. I won’t say it deserved to be one of the films nominated for The Golden Globes or the Oscars, but I get why it’s a hit. It’s probably the one Illumination Entertainment film I would watch the most out of their entire library, and I do like that they made two original films in 2016. A lot of people have probably already seen it, but if you haven’t, I can think of worse films to see in January than Sing. Well, we got the musical out of the way, how about we go into a more comedic film with Storks? Thanks for reading, I hope you all enjoyed the article, and see you all next time.

Rating: Go See it!