Sing!

Sometimes a movie comes along that is so good at what it does that it kills other movies that are trying to be in the same genre. That movie this year, for me, was "Zootopia", which was so good at creating a culture and a purpose for its city-of-talking-animals premise that it's managed to make two of Illumination's animated features look feeble by comparison. "Secret Life of Pets" was generic in several other ways too, from its borrowed-from-Toy-Story-premise of two rival dogs who need to get home downwards, but "Sing", while nice enough in the watching, is separately flawed.

For a start, there's never really a clear idea where it's meant to be taking place. Iconography appears to be grabbed at random between San Francisco and Los Angeles, And there really isn't a reason why many of the animals are the particular animal they are - or if there is, it's used in service of a one off gag only (the payoff to why the impresario of the theatre is a Koala and why his best friend is a sheep is pretty good, but the rest don't really do a lot). The subplots are overloaded and rarely overlap particularly, meaning that the finale concert is just a series of individual endings rather than a team effort. Nothing really seems to be thought through beyond it's immediate effect - Reese Witherspoon's Rosita invents an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine to help her get away to rehearsals, but there's no payoff within the context of the wider film, her abilities are only confined to her subplot).

I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a little bit of entertainment in this - but for a film with a long-ish running time, this doesn't feel like it's been fully thought through and worked on - it feels like the kinda thing Disney would send back for a second or third or fiftieth redraft until the film went from "okay" to "utter perfection". Which is why Disney is Disney and Illumination ... isn't.