Sing

When it comes to mod­ern cin­emago­ing, fea­ture ani­ma­tion is now part of the fur­ni­ture, with stu­dios like Pixar in par­tic­u­lar find­ing huge audi­ences with their emo­tion­al, cross-gen­er­a­tional crowd pleasers. Oth­er pro­duc­tion hous­es are attempt­ing to surf this wave with alter­na­tive, even par­o­d­ic ver­sions of fam­i­ly-ori­ent­ed movies.

In the midst of this meta mess is a film whose mod­esty belies how clever and engag­ing it is. Garth Jen­nings and Christophe Lourdelet’s Sing is that film, and it arrives as a breath of fresh air. The title itself is extreme­ly straight­for­ward but points direct­ly at the beau­ti­ful sim­plic­i­ty of the film’s cen­tral con­ceit: if singing makes you feel like a mil­lion bucks, then sing god­dam it.

No one is more aware of that ad hoc mantra than Buster Moon (voiced by an unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly cheer­ful Matthew McConaugh­ey), a the­atre direc­tor who, despite eco­nom­ic dif­fi­cul­ties, nev­er gives up his love of show busi­ness. His opti­mism first man­i­fests as a sim­ple kid­die movie trope, yet the sto­ry pro­gres­sive­ly imbues it with a sense of grav­i­tas and mean­ing which paints a real­is­tic and hope­ful por­trait of enter­tain­ers and the ener­gy that dri­ves them. Moon’s chal­lenge sees him con­tend­ing with the fact that every oth­er char­ac­ter has to face the dilem­ma: com­mit to artis­tic dreams or con­tin­ue with your com­pli­cat­ed life?

More per­son­al issues are explored through the ani­mals tak­ing part in Moon’s singing com­pe­ti­tion. Each is realised with great detail and a sur­pris­ing lev­el of real­ism. From the pres­sures of house­wifery to the chal­lenges of father-son rela­tion­ships, in under two hours, Jen­nings explores the spec­trum of human expe­ri­ence with a star­tling, unapolo­getic refusal to round off the edges. Rosi­ta (Reese With­er­spoon) strug­gles with her 25 piglets but the film doesn’t take the easy route of blam­ing her hus­band for not help­ing her in the house.

The not-quite epic yet excit­ing adven­ture pro­gress­es accord­ing to the basic, prag­mat­ic idea that every char­ac­ter does his or her best giv­en their cir­cum­stances, which doesn’t mean there is no place for spec­tac­u­lar action and strik­ing emo­tion. In fact, cap­i­tal­is­ing on the ran­dom­ness of life occu­pies such a pri­ma­ry place in the sto­ry that it makes for occa­sion­al­ly awk­ward tonal shifts, but most often fas­ci­nat­ing twists and mood swings. When por­cu­pine Ash (Scar­lett Johans­son) realis­es that her boyfriend and band­mate may not be what she needs, her cre­ativ­i­ty helps her mourn that rela­tion­ship and become some­one she nev­er thought she could or even want­ed to be.

Shifts in tem­pera­ment are echoed in the film’s undis­crim­i­nat­ing sound­track which nav­i­gates play­ful­ly between mod­ern pop (the cen­sor­ing of Nic­ki Minaj’s crude lyrics is clev­er­ly and hap­pi­ly dodged) and old clas­sics as crooned by the the charm­ing but arro­gant Mike (Seth Mac­Far­lane) whose ren­di­tion of ​‘My Way’ is pure swoon mate­r­i­al. Mod­ern musi­cals tend to fol­low Baz Luhrmann’s per­ilous path of remix­ing hits by alter­ing their genre, often show­ing a deeply con­fus­ing and offen­sive mis­un­der­stand­ing of what made the orig­i­nal song so suc­cess­ful. There is no such butch­ery here.

Every reg­is­ter is respect­ed and match­es a per­son­al­i­ty. Bring­ing togeth­er Katy Per­ry and Sina­tra, Jen­nings qui­et­ly var­nish­es his explo­ration of life and pas­sion with a sub­tle human­ism, offer­ing a point of entry for all tastes and all dreams.