Musical menagerie stays in tune
Warmth and humour abound in this sweet innocent film for kids
If you saw this year’s incredible animated tale Kubo and the Two Strings, you may not have recognized the de-southernized voice of Matthew McConaughey as the samurai Beetle.
He pops up again in this toe-tapping musical as a cuddly koala and theatre impresario named Buster Moon. Any more voice work and we’ll be able to declare a new M cC on na is san ce — call it the McConimation.
Buster doesn’t sing in Sing, but he is the fulcrum on which the plot swings. (And I do mean swings.)
His theatre on the verge of financial collapse, he decides to hold a music competition with a thousand-dollar purse to create a buzz in his anthropomorphic-animal city, which I think is a suburb of Zootopia.
But due to a typo in the flyer, the news goes out that there’s $100,000 to be won.
The result is a menagerie of musical tryouts. There’s a house-sow named Rosita (Reese Witherspoon), a stage-frightened elephant (Tori Kelly), and a rodent crooner voiced by Seth MacFarlane — imagine if Sinatra’s Rat Pack had a mouse among its members. There’s also a pair of punk porcupines (Scarlett Johansson and Beck Bennett), and Johnny (Taron Egerton), a gorilla from somewhere in East London; I’m going to guess Waltham Forest.
Every animal has his or her own story arc, most of them variations on the be-yourself/come-out-of-yourshell mantra that drives so many animated movies these days. For instance, Ash (voiced by Johansson) has to deal with her boyfriend’s jealousy when she makes the cut at the competition and he doesn’t. Also, she wants to wear black and sing angry songs, whereas Buster keeps insisting she’d be pretty in pink.
Buster isn’t a bad guy, though he is seriously deluded about his scheme’s chances of success. He’s also quite pushy about what he wants the acts to do, pairing Rosita with an excitable porcine dancer named Gunther (Nick Kroll), and demanding that Johnny play the piano. The extra practice time takes the gorilla away from his day job as a getaway driver in his dad’s gang.
With all these characters — and I haven’t even mentioned John C. Reilly as Buster’s best friend, a sheep named Eddie — there’s a lot to keep the movie chugging merrily along without stooping to scatological or pop-cultural humour. The musical numbers range from old classics (My Way), to nouveau pop (Call Me Maybe), although there is a ’70s/’80s emphasis, with standards from Elton John, Gipsy Kings and, in an ironic twist, both the late Leonard Cohen (Hallelujah) and David Bowie (Under Pressure).
The result is a sweet, G-rated tale. Writer/director Garth Jennings (Son of Rambow, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), and co-director Christophe Lourdelet bring warmth and humour to the mix, and know well enough that when the big numbers kick in, the best thing to do is just let the music take over.
A word of warning: Kids caught up in the genre may be demanding to see the (slightly), more adult musical La La Land next week.