An ornithological guide to ‘Birds’
Who’s who, and why they’re so mad, in ‘The Angry Birds Movie’
There may be a Falcon in Captain America: Civil War, but only one movie this summer features a whole flocking mess of personality.
The Angry Birds Movie (in theaters Friday), a big-screen animated take on the popular video-game app, sees a peaceful island of flightless birds have to go to slingshot war when a band of green pigs steals their eggs. The challenge for filmmakers: Take the icons from the game and turn them into “fully realized comedic personalities,” says Fergal Reilly, one of the directors of Angry Birds alongside Clay Kaytis. “It stands completely different from the game, but you can still see the DNA in the movie.”
Reilly gives USA TODAY’s Brian
Truitt a rundown on the fine feathered friends audiences will meet on Bird Island. RED (VOICED BY JASON SUDEIKIS) Abandoned by his parents and hatched in a lost-and-found room, Red has been angry pretty much his entire life, and that’s made the cranky curmudgeon an outsider in his own community. “We used to describe him in pitches as a red black spot on an otherwise happy island,” Reilly says. There is a heart of gold to the guy with the huge, expressive eyebrows, though he has no patience for getting sent to anger-management class or for elderly birds taking too long to cross a street: “The heart and soul of Red is the fact that he says and does the things we wish we could do.” MIGHTY EAGLE (PETER DINKLAGE) In the Angry Birds game, players can pay for Mighty Eagle to come in and solve all problems, but in the movie he’s like a star celebrity or jock whose best days are way in the rear-view mirror. A legend on Bird Island with his own statue, he’s a pompous guy who’s full of bombast that nobody has seen in forever. He’s “almost a security blanket,” Reilly says. “Whatever Mighty Eagle might have been in the past, the birds are hanging on to it. And so is Mighty Eagle. He’s hanging on to the residue of a glorious past. Deep down he’s afraid of what the birds might think of him now.” BOMB (DANNY MCBRIDE) Like his best pal Chuck, Bomb also is a misfit because of his anger issues — and because he’s basically a walking, talking IED. “He seems like the big, lovable jock but he suffers from intermittent explosive disorder,” Reilly says. “He can’t control when he blows up. That causes all kinds of problems on Bird Island because he can be so destructive when he gets angry. He learns to harness it to help the birds out, but in the beginning he has a problem making connections.” CHUCK (JOSH GAD) One of the three other angry birds Red meets in class, Chuck is more hyper than mad and does everything in super-speedy fashion. “He talks faster than he thinks, so there’s a constant stream of verbal diarrhea coming out of Chuck’s mouth, and that gets him into trouble because he just speaks his mind,” Reilly says. His character was taken from the basic aspects of the yellow triangular bird form the game, and filmmakers gave him a big long beak “that pokes into everybody’s personal space. He’s constantly needling Red and other birds for their attention. He’s like that little annoying friend you might have had in high school.”