Here’s a bright, breezily sweet-tempered animation written and directed by the talented Brit Garth Jennings, who made The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Son of Rambow. His movie features the regulation array of talking animals and star vocals; it’s impossible to dislike and impossible to love.
Sing is designed and built to the highest standards of professionalism; it’s a Volkswagen Passat of a family animation and there’s nothing wrong with that. But somehow the flash of creative anarchy or inspiration that we once remembered from the Pixar or DreamWorks meisterwerks seem as far away as ever.
Matthew McConaughey voices Buster Moon, a koala bear who is also a musical theatre impresario and fast-talking idealist facing bankruptcy. As a last throw of the dice, he sets up a singing competition and accidentally offers far too much prize money. It brings a selection of cutely backstoried singing animals out of the woodwork: a talented elephant, ape, mouse etc, not so different from the human variety of reality TV contestants. They have a crack at a familiar selection of tunes, including Carly Mae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe and Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off.
Perfectly likable stuff of the sort that’s harder to create than critics realise. But nothing all that memorable.
