Review: Sing

Sing (U)

USA/UK 2016 108 mins Dir: Garth Jennings Cast (voices): Matthew McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon, Seth MacFarlane, Scarlett Johansson, John C. Reilly, Taron Egerton, Tori Kelly

“A singing competition? Who wants to see another one of those?” demands an anthropomorphised sheep not long into Sing. It’s a question this latest animation from Illumination, the studio that gave us Minions and The Secret Life of Pets, never gets around to answering satisfactorily. The cynical calculation here seems to be that if audiences can be charmed by a few singing, dancing, animated beasts, then shitloads of them will prove even more popular. String these sequences together with a thin, perfunctory ‘Will this do?’ plot that apes the increasingly lame and tired talent contest shows infesting Saturday night TV and you’ve got a licence to rob small children of their pocket money. The only surprise is that Sing is Brit writer/director Garth Jennings’ first feature since that lovely 2007 charmer Son of Rambow.

Subtract all the wit and imagination from Disney’s splendid Zootropolis and you’ve got the animal metropolis in which the story unfolds. The anaemic storyline has impecunious koala impresario Buster Moon (Matthew McConaughey) setting out to save his theatre from closure by launching a singing contest. A misprint on the flyer leads to a $100,000 prize being offered rather than the $1,000 Buster can barely afford, so it’s not long before comedy animals are queuing round the block for auditions. The shortlisted menagerie includes an auto-tuned porker housewife with 25 piglets (Reese Witherspoon), a mildly rockin’ porcupine (Scarlett Johansson), a rodent saxophonist/crooner on the make (Seth MacFarlane), a cockney gorilla hippity-hopster (Taron Egerton) and a shy elephant (Tori Kelly).

With a further 90 minutes to fill until the inevitable all-singing, all-dancing ‘Let’s Do the Show Right Here!’ finale, various sub-plots are introduced – the bank attempting to foreclose on Buster, the gorilla resisting his dad’s demands to join the family criminal gang, the put-upon porker’s creation of a Heath Robinson-meets-Wallace and Gromit-style device to care for her brood while she’s out performing, and so on. None of these hang together at all well, and the cheesy morals (don’t let fear stop you from doing the thing you love, etc) feel more than usually shoehorned in among the 65 (count ’em!) songs – some of which are no more than snippets. Compensations are few and far between, though this reviewer smirked at the frog trio briefly performing Van Halen’s Jump, and Jennifer Saunders is good fun as the voice of a snooty, loaded, golden age ovine diva whom Buster taps up for cash. There’s been a fairly unconvincing attempt by excitable social media types to accuse the film of peddling racist stereotypes, though Brexiteers on the lookout for potential subtexts are likely to rejoice at the depiction of Gunter – a conspicuously well-nourished and self-satisfied German pig.