Illumination Entertainment gave us the humor of the Despicable Me franchise, the misstep of Minions, and the okay but megahit of The Secret Life of Pets. Now it’s time to sing it out with the musically competitive film, Sing. With the failing success of his theater, Buster Moon (Matthew McConaughey) has the bright idea of putting on a singing competition in order to save the theater. It’s basically Zootopia meets American Idol or The Voice depending which is better. Garth Jennings (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Son of Rambow) perfectly captured a well enough job at it as the animation looks really good.
And the voice talent here is believable. You got here Matthew McConaughey as the koala, Buster, Reese Witherspoon as the pig, Rosita, Scarlett Johansson as the porcupine, Ash, Taron Egerton as the gorilla, Johnny, Seth MacFarlane as the mouse, Mike and singer Tori Kelly as the elephant, Meena. Johnny and Meena were the two characters that were my favorite. When they needed to sing, if they did use their own voices, it wasn’t that bad. There’s a lot of contemporary music involved in this and for the most part, they’re pretty legit good covers of the songs. Though some of the songs go by too quick and don’t sing the full song as expected. Even though this had a missed opportunity for someone to sing “Sing” by My Chemical Romance.
Some of the jokes didn’t fully hit when it was needed. A few funny moments but nothing that was full-on hilarious. The main problem is that it’s really predictable. For movies involving competitions, sometimes it’s easy to pinpoint what will happen. Some of the character’s story arcs can be seen a mile away with the troupes their given, but it was handled the way it was meant to. And we already had a great movie involving a world full of animals. It’s called Zootopia.
Did this movie need to involve animals? Maybe so. It probably won’t be any different if it was humans. The message it was trying employ is overcoming obstacles and fear to hopefully make any desire come true and not be afraid. Overall, this is an animation that isn’t showing any new grounds with a concept like this and it’s probably not going to be one of the best-animated movies of the year. But for what it was going for, it’s only alright for what it was.
Sing was pretty predictable with a story like this, but it has very good voice talents and music to kind of makeup for its mistakes overall.
Grade: B-
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