Pin Cushion

 

Keeping this spoiler free, I took time out to go and see Sing at the cinema last night and wanted to share my thoughts. In brief I liked it. Sing is bright, colourful and nicely polished but the highlight of the feature is its music, it is packed start to finish with classic songs but isn’t the musical I’ve seen some people write it off as.

 

In summary for those who haven’t seen a trailer the film revolves around theatre owning Koala Buster Moon and his last ditch attempt to save his play house through a talent show with a hefty prize, an offer that brings a wide range of people to audition for a place to put their talents on show to the world.

 

So it’s a anthropomorphic feature, upright talking animals (always been a  big mark for that myself) so through most of it comparisons between this and last years well received  Zootropolis / Zootopia,  or whatever your regional equivalent name was,  ran through my mind allot and can’t be avoided here  although they are very different creatures.

Whereas the world of Zootropolis felt built from the ground up around the animals in all its technology and architectures, making it feel more validated to be an anthropomorphic feature, the cars, structures and everything else in sing is on that human scale, the reason for it being a talking animal feature being just that, a talking animal feature. With a few set pieces of critters singing songs you might not have expected from them it didn’t need to be so. The only concession to the standard scales over everything was Mike the smooth singing mouse’s car having a massively boosted seat but that still put him at the reach of a comparatively enormous steering wheel.

 

Plot wise it’s a passable but unsurprising story of a theatre owning strapped for cash putting on a show and the cast of hopefuls trying to find their feet and shine inspit4e of their personal life troubles. It rushes at the start to try and introduce to you its wide cast list but zooming around the city in one of many uses of short sound bits of licensed music that flow throughout Sing.

There aren’t any full musical numbers until the very end (excluding Rosita’s supermarket dance) when the long built up show finally happens and the acts put on their sets, brief 30 second snaps of music come up through the whole movie and most are recognizable classic songs that feel right for the scenes.

The voice performances both singing and talking are pretty solid with no one sticking out to me as a noticeably bad performance,

 

Visually the film is good, the world is bright, colourful and nicely rendered but lacking in imagination as Sing takes place in just a normal un-named city. The main cast all have sound enough designs but as with Zootropolis the background characters suffer from re-use,  the same models in different costumes appearing in different scenes thought out but this doesn’t happen enough of with anyone important enough to be a  real issue.

 

Stuff I didn’t care for, the thankfully one isolated series of fart jokes  from a  nervous auditionee that ran in quick succession that raised a laugh out of the children in the audience. The films wraps up some plot threads a bit quickly to the end and some unresolved like one of the cast owing a tonne of money to bank and Russian gangsters.

Lesserly and nitpickingly Rosita solves her babysitting problem for her enormous family by improvising a Rube Goldberg machine throughout her home to take care of her everyday chores, that left me wondering how a suburban house wife was able to rig all this complex timed gearing up from scrounged up household stuff MacGyver style with no previous hinting that she could do so. Must have made her an asset to the end where they basically build a whole light and pulley rigged stage from rubble and wreckage.

 

In conclusion, Sing is a good film, its story isn’t anything complex or questioning but it wasn’t insulting or stupid either, I recommend giving this sometime even if just for the sound scape of music seeded though it.

 

-Perils.