Musical with animal allure

and there’s no point lecturing those who believe in the illusion of natural-born talent and instant discovery on the importance of hard work. Why write your own music when there are so many catchy, if disposable, pop songs you could be covering instead? (Still, if there’s any justice, the Dave Bassett-supplied original number Set It All Free will be the one audiences come away singing.)

Owing to a slight miscommunication with his long-time assistant, Miss Crawly (a dotty old chameleon whom Jennings voices himself), the promotional fliers offer a grand prize of $100 000 to the winner – which happens to be $99 000 more than Buster has to his name. What follows is a kid-friendly riff on Broadway’s A Chorus Line, in which a diverse batch of talented singers show up to audition. Animation allows the film to zip along at five times the pace of a liveaction movie, compressing teenage relationship troubles (as experienced by Ash, Scarlett Johansson’s emotionally vulnerable porcupine), marital doldrums (Reese Witherspoon plays Rosita, an overworked pig saddled with 25 kids and an exhausted hubby), and unreasonable parental pressure ( Kingsman’s Taron Egerton is Johnny, a gorilla forced to take a stand against his dad’s criminal lifestyle in order to follow his own dreams) into vignettes that might normally take far longer to unfold.

While there are no profound life lessons to be found in these subplots, Jennings and his cast manage to deliver a steady supply of laughs, while respecting one of Illumination’s core principles: It’s okay to be silly, which is especially true of the behaviour to be found backstage, where a Teutonic attention hog (Nick Kroll, doing his best Flula Borg impression) and a group of J-pop pups threaten to steal the show. The auditions themselves are a quick-cut flurry of singer-to-song mismatch gags (three bunnies take a crack at Baby Got Back, a snail covers Christopher Cross’s Ride Like the Wind), making for a side-splitting sequence that represents a nearly unfathomable amount of work for music supervisor Jojo Villanueva and Universal’s legal team – who also had to get clearances on hits by Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Elton John, Stevie Wonder and Frank Sinatra (the latter crooned by Seth MacFarlane, no stranger to animation). The Family Guy creator has the perfect voice for Mike, a mouse with an ego big enough for an elephant, while Grammy-nominated newcomer Tori Kelly plays Meena, a mousy pachyderm trying to work up the nerve to perform in front of a crowd.

Just when you think you’ve figured out how Buster will raise the prize money (Jennifer Hudson and Jennifer Saunders split the role of retired theatre diva Nana Noodleman) and who will win it, Jennings’ script takes an unexpected turn, humbling Buster and his woolly enabler Eddie (John C Reilly), who hilariously redeem themselves by swallowing their pride and washing cars.

But the show must go on, and Sing launches itself into the stratosphere with a radically reconceived version of Buster’s talent contest, in which multiple subplots coalesce as each of the principal characters gets his or her moment in the spotlight. – Variety

Sing The pace of allows viewers insight into the lives of characters like Gunter and Rosita through compressed vignettes.