Migra­tion review – A sore­ly under­pow­ered duck tale

Every­one knows that Salt Bae is one of the most awful humans cur­rent­ly roam­ing the plan­et, and you’ll be hap­py to dis­cov­er that the folks over at Illu­mi­na­tion Ani­ma­tion Stu­dios con­cur with that fact. A name­less, voice­less par­o­dy of Salt Bae turns up as the knife-wield­ing, indoor micro sun­glass­es-wear­ing antag­o­nist in Migra­tion, a light com­ic caper about a fam­i­ly of mal­lards (always referred to here as mal­lards, nev­er ducks?) who acci­den­tal­ly migrate north for the win­ter and end up in New York City.

The evil chef is intro­duced as some­one who keeps a trop­i­cal macaw locked up in a very small cage, and he’s shown vio­lent­ly humil­i­at­ing one of his sous chefs for what he con­strues to be an infe­ri­or plate of food. Yet rather than steak wrapped in gold leaf, duck à l’orange, that 70s clas­sic, is the chef’s spe­cial­i­ty, and he’s depict­ed fetishis­ing a sharp carv­ing blade in every shot he appears, either spin­ning it around his fin­ger like a six-shoot­er, or scrap­ing it along the crispy skin of the roast­ed bird.

His pres­ence in the film serves to high­light what a lop-sided affair it is, as it is ini­tial­ly focused on the mal­lards’ jour­ney, and then sud­den­ly they have this pan­tomime foe to attend to. I must say that, while watch­ing Migra­tion, I was hop­ing that it was going to be about the pow­er­ful sym­bol­ism that can be imposed onto the out-of-sea­son appear­ance of ducks in urban set­tings. I also hoped that it was going to reveal that these were the ducks that set up shop in Tony Soprano’s swim­ming pool and sent him on his pro­longed exis­ten­tial tail­spin… alas!

Migra­tion is not an ambi­tious film, and doesn’t seem to have any­thing impor­tant to say about why one might migrate and the lessons we can learn from this rather ardu­ous but nec­es­sary endeav­our. There’s not even any com­men­tary on the rel­a­tive dif­fer­ences between the coun­try and the city. There’s lots of sil­ly humour aimed at knee-highs and many of the jokes and set-ups have been repack­aged from all man­ner of wise-crack­ing ani­mal-based ani­ma­tions from past times.

Kumail Nan­jiani and Eliz­a­beth Banks earn their pay­checks voic­ing the two par­ent mal­lards, Mack and Pam, accept­ing the very easy ride of essen­tial­ly hav­ing to light­ly adapt their stan­dard com­ic per­sonas to the world of anthro­po­mor­phised ducks. How­ev­er, one major edu­ca­tion­al plus point in the film is that I was shocked at the rev­e­la­tion that herons eat ducks. Who knew?!

The screen­play by Mike White was clear­ly writ­ten dur­ing his White Lotus chai breaks, and it’s sad to see that the film was direct­ed by Ben­jamin Ren­ner who, in 2012, made the won­der­ful, orig­i­nal and com­plete­ly charm­ing ani­mat­ed fea­ture Ernest & Celes­tine. Here, has ful­ly giv­en his cre­ative instincts over to the immov­able style tem­plate of the Illu­mi­na­tion brain trust, and there’s real­ly no evi­dence here that he was one time respon­si­ble for such a love­ly, rich and humane movie – all qual­i­ties that Migra­tion sore­ly lacks.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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