Sing (2016)

Sing (2016)

Directors: Christophe Lourdelet, Garth Jennings

Writer: Garth Jennings

Stars: Matthew McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon, Seth MacFarlane

PG | 1h 48min | Animation, Comedy, Drama

Storyline

Set in a world like ours but entirely inhabited by animals, Buster Moon a dapper koala who presides over a once-grand theater that has fallen on hard times. Buster is an eternal-some might even say delusional-optimist who loves his theater above all and will do anything to preserve it. Now faced with the crumbling of his life's ambition, he has one final chance to restore his fading jewel to its former glory by producing the world's greatest singing competition.

IMDB Rating 7.3/10

Do you remember the scene at the very end of animation studio Illumination’s Despicable Me where Gru’s adopted daughters manage to persuade their new dad to come up on stage during their ballet recital and they all boogie together to the Bee Gees’ “You Should Be Dancing” with the minions? And Gru busts out the most amazing moves, and it’s all so perfectly animated, every hip shake and arched eyebrow calibrated down to the tiniest cartoon muscle, it draws tears? Well, Sing pulls off that trick for around 20 minutes straight in its last act, producing pure, sappy joy with a string of air-punching, applause-coaxing performances from nearly every main character as they put on a show right there, in a nearly derelict theater with a soundtrack album’s worth of crowd-pleasing tunes. It’s as corny as the syrup tank at a candy factory, but it works, and it will undoubtedly ensure enthusiastic enough word-of-mouth to keep this in cinemas long into the new year after it opens Dec. 21 in the U.S. and then rolls out worldwide. 

That said, and sorry to be a buzzkill, but it’s a bit of a shame that the rest of the film doesn’t achieve that same high standard. Illumination’s latest plays to the company’s strengths, with inventive character and background design, hyper-rendered animation that pushes the technology envelope, especially in the realm of lighting and cute sight gags. But just as with, for example, The Secret Life of Pets or Minions (and let’s not even go there with Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax), storytelling remains the outfit’s weak spot. 

It might be conjectured that the powers-that-be are aware of this and that might be one reason why British live-action writer-director Garth Jennings, who made the delightful homage to low-budget filmmaking Son of Rambow, was hired to oversee this. But the fit isn’t quite perfect, and while there’s much to admire about the script, not least the fact that it’s an original concept in a sea of remakes, reimaginings and reboots, it doesn’t entirely gel. Maybe the problem is that at this point in 2016, the whole talent-show format that has so dominated television for the last 10 years or so finally feels exhausted and dreary.

Meanwhile, it doesn’t quite help Sing’s case that, so soon after Disney’s Zootopia, it unfolds in a world of bipedal talking animals living in another sprawling city. Sure, there have been articulate critters ever since Mickey Mouse started whistling and Betty Boop had long ears suggestive of her spaniel heritage, although the trope had fallen out of favor of late. Part of what made Zootopia effective was the way it not only revived the idea but also made the harmony — or lack thereof — in a multispecies society an integral part of the plot.

By way of contrast, in Sing there’s no reason within the story for one of its major characters, Buster Moon (voiced by Matthew McConaughey), to be a koala except that it means he’s cute. Also, his size serves well for an admittedly very funny car-wash gag halfway through. But he’s not even Australian. Buster is just another American-accented marsupial with a passion for showbiz, whose inciting idea to put on a talent show brings together the disparate characters that make up the roster talent assembled here. Unluckily for Buster, a typing mistake made by his faithful one-eyed lizard secretary and factotum Miss Crawl (voiced by Jennings himself) mistakenly reports the prize will be $100,000, not the $1,000 Buster has in his savings bank.

The money certainly motivates Mike, a mouse on the hustle whose abrasive, jerky quality is only enhanced by the fact he’s voiced by Seth MacFarlane. But money is only part of the lure for most of the other major characters, an assortment of mammalian hopefuls that includes: Rosita, a put-upon porcine mom of 25 (Reese Witherspoon); a teenage British gorilla (Taron Egerton) who doesn’t really want to follow his father (Peter Serafinowicz) into the family’s bank-robbing business; spiky porcupine punk Ash (Scarlett Johansson), whose acceptance onto the show jeopardizes her relationship with her rejected boyfriend (Beck Bennett); and Meena (Tori Kelly), the painfully shy elephant at the back of the room who is too scared to sing in front of others and ends up working as a stagehand for Buster.

With such a stellar cast on hand (even supporting and minor parts are voiced by the likes of Nick Offerman, Leslie Jones, Jennifer Saunders, Rhea Perlman and John C. Reilly, with singing support from the likes of Jennifer Hudson), it’s no surprise that Sing is a treat for both the ears and eyes. Apparently, the cast all sang their songs themselves, with surprisingly impressive results, although who knows how much auto-tuning went into creating the finished soundtrack. Still, while it’s hardly a surprise to hear how well widely known quantities like Witherspoon and MacFarlane hit the high notes with covers of “Shake It Off” and “My Way,” respectively, those less familiar with Johansson’s parallel career as a chanteuse have a treat in store on hearing what she can do with an original song, “Set It All Free,” written for the film by producer-composer Dave Bassett. Likewise, Egerton’s boy-band balladeering represents another pleasant surprise.

One can only speculate at how many billable hours went toward intellectual-property lawyers for clearing the rights to the 65 different songs that are featured here. Some are merely snatches and phrases (hello pan-pipe theme from Once Upon a Time in America) which might have been free under the terms of fair use, but still, the music alone must have represented a big chunk of the budget, along with the above-the-line talent’s fees and the computing costs that went into rendering the film's many dazzling traveling shots.

Read full review at Hollywood reporter

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‘Sing’ Gives Animated Belters a Stage

The things you can do with computer animation these days are just more and more amazing. In “Sing,” a funny animal jukebox musical cartoon written and directed by Garth Jennings (“Son of Rambow”), there is a scene in which two postpunk porcupines, one of whom has been selected to compete in a vocal competition, argue at home about the state of their relationship, and their musical direction. During their quarrel I thought, with absolute earnestness, “Wow, these porcupines have an unusually spacious apartment.”

The funny animal jukebox musical cartoon has a long and honorable history, dating back to, for example, the 1936 animated short “I Love to Singa.” That still-beloved cartoon, directed by Tex Avery, features a jazz-loving young hooter who, much to the consternation of his classically trained family, bills himself as Owl Jolson on a radio amateur hour hosted by Jack Bunny. “Sing” is essentially that very short, writ large.

A failing theatrical entrepreneur, Buster Moon (voiced by Matthew McConaughey), a koala of some winsomeness and no small enthusiasm, decides to revive his fortunes with a singing competition. From a slew of auditioners (his secretary, an iguana with one glass eye, has advertised the award money as $100,000 rather than the single grand he actually has) he picks a motley handful. Among them: Johnny (Taron Egerton), a gorilla from a British-accented bank-robbing clan, who sings like Sam Smith when he’s not singing like Elton John; Rosita (Reese Witherspoon), a stressed housewife pig; a crooning, fedora-sporting, smart-mouthed mouse named Mike (Seth MacFarlane, duh); and a shy elephant, Meena (Tori Kelly), who sings Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” to herself when nobody’s listening.

“Sing” is relentlessly amiable, and has little in the way of vulgar humor. There’s just one flatulence joke, which has to be some kind of record for a contemporary non-Pixar kid-friendly animated movie. (The film is produced by Illumination, the corporation behind “Despicable Me” and its spinoff, “Minions.”)

Mr. McConaughey’s characterization of the eager koala is full of ingratiating pep. (I found this to be a relief; from his line readings in the Lincoln TV ads, I worried that he might have been suffering from laudanum poisoning.) A couple of scenes are quite charming, such as Rosita’s supermarket dance and little Mike’s microphone acrobatics late in the movie. And yet. The movie is constantly knocking itself out trying to reach the approximate emotional temperature of that scene in “Shrek” during which Smash Mouth ruins “I’m a Believer.” The aggregate effect is like aesthetic insulin shock, albeit from an artificial sweetener.

Read full review at New york times

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  Not Even Talking Animals Can Save Jukebox Musical Sing   

'Sing' jumps around from song to song, and from plot point to plot point, unable to trust in our attention spans  

How you feel about Garth Jennings and Christophe Lourdelet’s animated jukebox musical Sing depends less on your tolerance for watching animals warble, roar and croon pop songs for nearly two hours—and who doesn’t love that?—than on your patience for pinball-machine story mechanics and hyper-self-aware adorableness. Matthew McConaughey provides the voice of show-biz impresario, theater-owner and koala Buster Moon, whose business is failing thanks to too many clunkers. He decides that a talent contest is the way to bring in bucks, so he announces one, offering a $1,000 prize, money he barely has. His elderly secretary, Miss Crawly (Garth Jennings), a shuffling lizard with an ill-fitting glass eye (she also happens to be the movie’s best major character), mistypes the amount on the advertising fliers, increasing it a hundredfold. Scores of animals show up for the big audition, and this is the picture’s finest scene, energetic without being exhausting: A water buffalo Barry Whites his way through Crazy Town’s “Butterfly;” a snail in a bowtie clings to the mic as he shimmies to Christopher Cross’ “Ride Like the Wind.”

Sadly, those two fine performers don’t make Buster’s cut, and after they’re axed, Sing demands that we shift our attention to the actual finalists and the workaday problems they face when they’re not singing: Rosita (Reese Witherspoon) is a beleaguered piggy homemaker and mom with an unappreciative husband (Nick Offerman) and too many little piggies to look after. Ash (Scarlett Johansson) is a punky, spunky porcupine, in a plaid mini-kilt, who’s suffering through a breakup with a bad boyfriend. Mike (Seth MacFarlane) is a slick Sinatra-esque mouse with a rat-sized gambling debt. Meena (Tori Kelly) is an elephant with self-confidence issues. And so on.

Sing is the latest from Illumination Entertainment, which also brought us the double bummers The Secret Life of Pets and Minions. This movie suffers from almost exactly the same problems as those two do: It jumps around from song to song, and from plot point to plot point, unable to trust in the attention spans of modern children, or even just modern human beings. The color scheme is bright and cheerful, the fur and scales and eyes of the animals look super-realistic, and a few of the musical numbers are mildly rousing, The best may be Rosita/Witherspoon’s rendering of Taylor Swift’s no-flies-on-me anthem “Shake It Off.” (She’s joined by Nick Kroll, who voices the character of her song-and-dance partner, a porker in a tight, spangly jumpsuit named Gunter.) But Sing, like its yearning-for-validation characters, mostly just radiates desperation. Plus, the snail should have won.

Read full review at Time

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