You could do worse at half-term than this new family animation from Illumination (the studio behind Sing and Minions). It’s a zany caper about a family of mallards; it’s not particularly original, with ideas and laughs that feel a little dusty, like they’ve been cobbled from bits and bobs knocking around the studio. But there are enough high jinks – as well as a seriously cute duckling – to keep it on the flight path.
In New England, a daddy duck called Mack (voiced by Kumail Nanjiani) is risk-averse and overprotective of his two kids: teenager Dax (Caspar Jennings) and that adorable duckling, Gwen (Tresi Gazal). Somehow, the kids twist Mack’s wing into migrating south for the first time, and what follows is a series of scrapes as the family fly to Jamaica. After a wrong turn they crash-land in New York, where the animators go to town on a gaggle of realistic-looking pigeons whose aggro leader has an unsightly rotted-off foot and is brilliantly voiced by Awkwafina with a Noo Yoik hoodlum accent.
The script is co-written by Mike White, creator of The White Lotus; White is vegan, apparently, so naturally much of the jeopardy revolves around the ducks being at risk of ending up on someone’s plate. There’s a disappointingly bland personality-lite non-speaking villain called Chef, owner of a Manhattan restaurant, who looks creepily like Bono beefed up to the size of the Rock, with a goatee and tiny tinted glasses. More fun is the duck farm run by two boomer hippies, where the duck in charge is a shaman dude voiced by Peep Show’s David Mitchell.
All of which make for a perfectly acceptable family animation. But Migration does feels like B-team Illumination, and time will tell if it has any franchise potential. I can’t imagine kids watching this nine times over like Sing. That said, my two seven-year-old cinema buddies giggled themselves senseless on the bus home repeating a line about the mallards getting turned into duck a l’orange. So what do I know?
• Migration is released on 2 February in UK and Irish cinemas
