It's only been six years since Illumination Entertainment burst onto the animated scene with Despicable Me, but the studio's annual output of increasingly disappointing films makes their first - and best - project feel like a lifetime ago. Critical reception hasn't hampered their box office success, however - last year's Minions grossed more than $1 billion globally - and as we head into the holidays this weekend, Illumination is hoping the cute and cuddly stars of its latest offering, Sing, will charm their way into your hearts (and wallets).
After falling in love with show business at a young age, snappily dressed koala Buster Moon (Matthew McConaughey) opens his own small theater in the heart of the city, thanks to a lifetime of hard work from his father. But business acumen isn't Buster's strong suit, and it doesn't take long before he finds himself teetering on the edge of bankruptcy - the film opens with him escaping through the building's rafters as unpaid laborers pound on his office door.
In an effort to revitalize his crumbling livelihood, Buster elects to hold a singing competition, offering a prize of $1000 to the winning vocalist. The fact that Buster doesn't have enough cash is troublesome enough, but when his aging secretary mistakenly prints a stack of flyers offering $100,000 and citizens flock to his theater to audition, Buster cheerfully forges ahead, knowing full well that he's building the entire production on a foundation of deceit.
The finalists include Johnny (Taron Egerton), a gorilla who dreams of stardom instead of joining his father's gang of bank robbers; Rosita (Reese Witherspoon), an overworked mother of 25 piglets whose husband takes her for granted; Mike (Seth MacFarlane), a saxophone-playing mouse who croons like Sinatra; and Ash (Scarlett Johansson), a punk rock porcupine with an egomaniac boyfriend who doesn't believe in her talents. There's also Meena (Tori Kelly), a shy teenage elephant with a great voice and a paralyzing case of stage fright.
One of the biggest problems with Sing is that it often feels mean-spirited. Johnny's father disowns him when he learns that his son wants to be a performer, Ash's boyfriend begins cheating on her when she declines his suggestion to drop out of the show, and Mike is a degenerate gambler who constantly belittles and berates his fellow contestants, and even tries to talk his way out of debt by revealing the location of Buster's prize money (which falls well short of the advertised amount). And Buster himself, as the central figure and patriarch of the theater, has obviously been stiffing his workers for years and seemingly has no qualms about conjuring a contest for which the prize cannot possibly be awarded, as if the fame and recognition he dreams of is an acceptable trade-off for the inevitable crushed hopes of his singers.
An endless parade of pop songs - most of them reduced to 15-second snippets - belted out by a colorful collection of animals will likely be more than enough for younger audiences to enjoy what Sing has to offer. But in a year that gave us thoughtful, nuanced animated choices like Kubo and the Two Strings and Zootopia (which handles the animals-as-people shtick in far better fashion), Sing's unlikable characters, complete lack of depth and lowest-common-denominator humor leave the project feeling just as tone-deaf as some of the rejected contestants.
