ANGRY BIRDS BRING MIRTH
Game hatches a decent film
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What makes a film “family friendly?” If you’re Pixar, it involves wrapping vibrant visuals and simple storylines into a dense layer of nuanced ideas and relatively highbrow concepts. It’s a complex technique the studio has been mastering for more than 20 years, from Toy Story and its explorations of camaraderie and authenticity, to last year’s Inside Out and its accurate portrayal of a child coming of age.
While Pixar generally goes for subtle, Angry Birds goes for broke with a more visceral approach, packing in pop culture references bound to go over any child’s head, no matter how precocious.
Take the film’s soundtrack, which pairs meme pop and rock like Never Gonna Give You Up and Rock You Like a Hurricane with the source video game’s addictive jingles: something for parents and children alike — but never at the same time.
Its story is as “by-the-numbers” as it gets: Red (Jason Sudeikis) is alienated from his idyllic avian community for his anger and cynicism, and meets the fast-talking Chuck (Josh Gad) and gentle giant Bomb (Danny McBride) in anger-management class.
When the not-so-vaguely colonialist pigs show up, Red’s skepticism turns the trio into heroes leading the effort to save the birds’ eggs after the piggies poach them.
The film’s plot and visuals are enough to satisfy the children, and the moral lessons are definitely present.
Quick-to-blame protagonist Red is told in the opening scene to “take responsibility” for his actions. Guess what he ends up doing by the end of the film? But still, Red’s grumpiness, while exaggerated (this is a children’s film, after all), isn’t so far removed from an actual, nuanced feeling.
But the true story of Angry Birds has always been that the pigs have stolen the birds’ eggs, and the birds will do anything — risking their virtual, pixelated little lives — to rescue them. The video games do a wonderful job of embodying the pigs’ surefire antagonism through their character designs. The film retains these details to great success. The pigs are given little characterization beyond being the smug antagonists, but those toothy grins are bound to bring up the same, blood-boiling rage on the big screen as they do in the video game.
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the film is the painstaking replication of its source material. Players of the game use a virtual slingshot to manoeuvre a squadron of birds at an optimal angle to wreak havoc on those pesky pigs, who have set up elaborate (but completely breakable) structures of wood, stone, glass and, least understandably, TNT. And of course, the birds have special powers, which are only active mid-flight (natch). All of this comes to life in the film’s climax, which will surely delight Angry Birds players everywhere.
As a movie, Angry Birds offers something for everyone: a silly but morally present narrative for children; lots of pop culture references for adults; a faithful adaptation for Angry Birds players of the video game; and vibrantly rendered 3D animation.
It might not offer the cathartic resonance of a Pixar classic, but its accessible elements make it fun for the whole family.