The plot: As his flock prepares to migrate for the winter, Peng (Jim Gaffigan) finds himself stranded on his own. He comes across two ducklings, Chi (Zendaya) and Chao (Lance Lim), who have also been separated from their flock, and he begrudgingly agrees to join them as they both make their way back to their respective families. However, with the psychotic cat Banzou (Greg Proops) hot on their trails, it seems that their migration has only begun to get difficult.
Gaffigan is a decent fit as the gander who
needs to grow up and be part of a flock/family, getting some good chuckles in
while also serving nicely with the more dramatic moments. Zendaya and Lim as
the two ducklings do pretty good as a buddy team, even if Lim is honestly more
entertaining in the middle of… well, I can’t even call it “hangry”; it’s more
“hossessed” in how weird a certain moment in this turns out, but it’s still
entertaining nonetheless. Proops as the evil cat not only does well on the
intimidation factor and makes for a decent villain, he handles the more
Gollum-y moments quite nicely on top of that. Stephen Fry and Craig Ferguson as
a double act (man, someone involved with this film must have been peeking at my
cinematic wish list) do well, even if they aren’t exactly given the most worthy
material, and Rick Overton and Jennifer “Yes, the same one from Dirty Dancing”
Grey as a rooster and hen respectively make for another decent duo in their
domestic quarrelling.
So, this film is already off to a promising start with the
cast list here; how about the animation? Well, the water textures suck. Big
time. Like, the worst I’ve ever seen in a film I’ve had to review. It has that
same quality to it that you would expect from either an animation demo to show
how the in-engine physics work for the given software, or from a first-year
animation student who is still grappling with the basics.
It is painfully
distracting, not only because the water features in a lot of key moments in the
narrative, but also because it is the only really egregious thing to be found
as far as visual quality. The rest of the film actually looks pretty damn good,
with solid texture work on the animals, giving that nice balance between
cartoonish and realistic (leaning more on the cartoonish side, a la early
Dreamworks), and the scenery is genuinely impressive. Whether it’s the
startlingly well-rendered interior of an underground cave, the dimly-lit hustle
and bustle of the human town, or the red-and-orange glow of the autumn foliage,
this looks quite nice. Doubly so for the flying sequences, which make for some
nice action beats.
Okay, good acting and good animation; what about the
writing? Well, while it isn’t nearly as dismal as some of the other talking animal movies I’ve had to
sit through this year already, it isn’t anything necessarily to write home
about either. Let’s try and ignore the irony of me putting that last statement
into writing. It’s a fairly straight-forward story about the loner who learns
how to work in a group, framed against the Chinese landscape with bird
migration basically being the push for the story to progress. As far as
parables against isolationism go, this isn’t anything exciting but it’s
definitely serviceable. There’s a little too
much reliance on fart jokes (and really plain fart jokes at that) but there’s
nothing in the comedy here that really grates too much. It gets some decent
chuckles, nothing too substantial but it didn’t give me the urge to just walk
out at any point. Yes, after having sat through films like Pup Star, this is
how low the bar has been set.
Not that it really needs to be as, on top of
doing well enough as a comedy, its take on being part of a natural community
and being a parent in particular are rather solid. The emotional turns fit
nicely, nothing feels too manipulative or too cloying to be ineffective, and
watching the relationship between Peng and Chi & Chao grow as the film goes
on is rather nice.
So, it all looks just fine so far. Nothing exciting, but
fine… until I started doing my usual overthinking of things and came across
something a bit troubling. While the film itself is animated by Original Force,
the film’s production as a whole was led by Wanda Media, a subsidiary of Dalian
Wanda Group. Now, that name might not seem too familiar at first, but I can
guarantee that you’ve come across them at some point. Not only are they the
current owners of Legendary Entertainment, who have been behind a lot of giant creature features over the
last few years including the latest Godzilla franchise, but Wanda is also the
owner of the Hoyts Group, the company behind one of the biggest cinema chains
here in Australia, as well as owning majority shares for AMC Theatres in the
United States.
Why is this important? Well, as much as I would like to reduce
any kind of fearmongering “The Chinese are taking over, run!” sentiment that is
far too prevalent in the Western world already, I would like to draw Wanda’s
place in the place industry against its cultural background. Wanda Group,
between its cinematic ventures and its real estate holdings, is a big cultural
force in China, and it seems like they’re in the middle of making some serious power moves as far as Hollywood is concerned.
But to what end? Well, keep in mind that this company also gave us The Great Wall, a film that I and many other critics wound up wholly misrepresenting. It
wasn’t a white saviour narrative, not that it even tried to be; it was meant to
be a piece of nationalist propaganda, and while I honestly didn’t take issue
with it, that connection does make this film’s emphasis on the flock and the
repeated chants of “birds of a feather migrate together”, spoken like a
military cry, a little iffy.
But hey, why should China be any different as far as pushing
nationalist ideas go? Yeah, the focus on being part of a larger group has some
communist undertones to it, but so what? Given how the only Chinese human
characters are portrayed here (in a jarring but ultimately effective look at
the ultimate fate of a lot of the native poultry), it doesn’t carry any
emphatic aggrandising of its home culture; just the nature that exists around
it. And as for a possible argument towards this being communist propaganda
(yeah, even I’m surprised that the
review went in this direction)… well, as I’ve said in the past, I’m getting
quite tired of isolationist rhetoric, and since it falls neatly into more
traditional family-friendly territory here, that very well could be the case but it
doesn’t necessarily need to be read as such. I know this is going to be a weird
statement to make, especially after dedicating so much of this review to it
but… let’s leave the politics alone on this one.
All in all… yeah, serious digression there, but this is
honestly a decent film. Not amazing, but decent. The acting is (mostly) good,
the jokes are (mostly) tolerable, the animation is (mostly) well-rendered, and
the message at the core of the narrative is (mostly) harmless. I’d say it’s an
indication of how low this year’s standard has been for more ostensibly
kid-friendly cinema, but this still has enough pull to it to make it good
enough for kids, and not a pain to sit through for adults. That’s a win in my
book. Hell, even the fact that I was able to wring what could very well be some
political context out of this production already gives it an edge; it may have
just been a thought experiment, but I like films that give me interesting
things to write about. Okay, ‘interesting’ is subjective here, but still.
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