Sing

There’s a lot of color, a lot of music, and a LOT of animals in Sing, Illumination Entertainment’s big holiday release. But for all the voices harmonizing in perfect pitch, much of the story feels flat.

Illumination (best known for Despicable Me) brings a huge cast of A-list talent to Sing, including Matthew McConaughey as a corrupt-but-lovable koala bear named Buster Moon who launches a singing competition to save his theater. He’s backed up by Reese Witherspoon as a worn-out mom to 25 piglets hoping to recapture her former glory and Scarlett Johannson as a rebellious porcupine rocker. True to Illumination’s form, the action is often frantic, nonsensical, and chock-full of sight gags. Like The Secret Life of Pets, a few pop-culture references border on inappropriate and deserve the PG rating, but kids aren’t likely to catch them. By the end, when the big concert moment finally happens, you almost forget how underdeveloped the first two acts were. You just sit back and let the singalong wash over you.

If Sing were a Pixar movie, it might have celebrated music for music’s sake the way Ratatouille celebrated the artistry of cooking. Or it might have explored how one finds a new dream after youthful hopes of stardom fade the way Toy Story 3 and Inside Out grappled with changing life direction. But it’s not a Pixar movie, so a frenzy of rock anthems and paint-by-numbers themes of “be yourself” and “believe in yourself” will have to suffice.

To a certain degree they do. All those singing-competition TV shows are popular for a reason, and the draw is no less present when the contestant is a cockney-accented gorilla-without-a-cause. It’s fun to hear unlikely people knock treasured classics out of the park. If Sing focused just on this, it would have been a much more entertaining movie. Instead it spends way too much time on the antics of Buster and his slacker sidekick in a plotline that kids won’t get and parents won’t enjoy. But everyone will enjoy that concert at the end. Just hope the kids don’t drag you back for an encore.