Not Hilariously Funny, But Beautiful and Cheerful: A Cartoon About Dealing with Criminal Pigs
Red, a red-feathered bird, lives on an island populated by birds. Unlike his friendly and docile counterparts, Red is suspicious and unsociable, and he struggles to control his frequently erupting anger. Eventually, the local judge runs out of patience and sentences Red to anger management classes. There, he meets several other birds with different but similar psychological issues. Chuck, for example, is so energetic that he can’t stop himself, and Bomb got his nickname because he literally explodes when something annoys him. While Red and his new friends reluctantly attend classes, a ship arrives on the island carrying pigs. All the other birds welcome the “tourists” as family, but Red suspects that the featherless aliens are up to something. And he’s right – one night, the pigs sail away with all the birds’ eggs. To save their offspring, the birds rush after the kidnappers. They are ready for anything – even war.
.jpg “A scene from the movie “The Angry Birds Movie””)
Rovio, the studio that created the Angry Birds game series, invested over $100 million in the production of the film. This is the most expensive film project in Finnish history.
In those legendary times when video games were sold on cartridges and floppy disks, the plots of many of them were exhausted by two sentences: “The villains did something bad. Avenge them!” Nowadays, popular games for consoles and computers are usually much more complex, with many characters, plot twists, and dialogue scenes. Mobile games, however, often retain the simplicity of their 8-bit predecessors, and no one is worried about it. When you play on the subway or in line, you want to tap the screen, not think about what is happening to the characters or listen to their profound and dramatic dialogues.
.jpg “A scene from the movie “The Angry Birds Movie””)
Based on the above, it is strange to read in the press materials for the new film “The Angry Birds Movie” that fans have been bombarding the Finnish creators of the Angry Birds mobile game for years with questions about why the feathered heroes are so angry. After all, the game directly stated (or rather, showed) that the pigs stole the birds’ eggs and that the birds selflessly throw themselves at the walls of the pigs’ buildings to save their clutches or avenge those who made an omelet out of them. Did the fans really want a detailed explanation? Or could they not understand why stealing eggs would upset the parents of future chicks?
.jpg “A scene from the movie “The Angry Birds Movie””)
In the Russian version of the film, Red, Chuck, and Bomb are voiced by comedians Alexander Tsekalo, Timur Rodriguez, and Semyon Slepakov.
However, it doesn’t matter whether hordes of Angry Birds fans really begged Rovio to tell the story of the birds and pigs in detail, or whether this is a typical exaggeration for promotional materials. What matters is that Rovio and Sony, through its animation division Sony Pictures Imageworks, spent a lot of effort and money to give the Angry Birds characters (red bird, yellow bird, white bird, black bird, and so on) names and personalities and turn them from game heroes into heroes of a comedy cartoon. Which tells how the birds and pigs first became friends and then quarreled.
.jpg “A scene from the movie “The Angry Birds Movie””)
What to Expect
It should be said right away that you should not expect any special plot twists from “The Angry Birds Movie.” This is not some kind of “radical rethinking.” The film strictly follows the canonical plot and pours a lot of water into the script to turn two sentences (“The pigs stole our eggs. Let’s avenge them!”) into 90 minutes of screen time. And it does this so “well” that more than an hour passes before the birds begin combat operations, shooting themselves at the city of pigs from a giant slingshot. So if you hope that the film is structured like a mobile game and that after a short prologue the heroes will spend the whole picture in battle, then do not flatter yourself. There is only one battle in the film. True, it is a large-scale and long battle with numerous destructions and with the participation of all the main characters. But for the film adaptation of Angry Birds, this is somehow not enough.
.jpg “A scene from the movie “The Angry Birds Movie””)
Humor and Animation
Leaving the shooting of birds for dessert, the film offers, as the main course, the noisy and hyperactive humor typical of modern Hollywood animation with a continuous stream of jokes and gags. As usual, the jokes in “The Angry Birds Movie” are mostly old and not always funny. But since there are many of them, the number of hits is large enough, and there is something to laugh at in the film. And both children and adults. Although mostly, of course, children. The bright in all respects feathered heroes with simple characters and suddenly manifesting impressive superpowers, such as Chuck’s ability to move at the speed of Neo from “The Matrix,” are designed for kids.
.jpg “A scene from the movie “The Angry Birds Movie””)
The Unexpected Moral
Perhaps the two best components of the film are its magnificent, stunning animation, which is even stronger than in the previous creations of Sony Pictures Imageworks (the “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” and “Hotel Transylvania” dilogies), and the unexpected moral. While usually Hollywood cartoons prescribe to love strangers and accept them with all their advantages and disadvantages, “The Angry Birds Movie” teaches to carefully look at the “newcomers,” listen to those who show reasonable caution, and punish aliens to the fullest extent if they encroach on the sacred. This is by no means a picture in the finale of which the birds and pigs realize the absurdity of the war and start an eternal friendship. As long as the pigs love omelet, this is impossible, and the characters do not even mention any reconciliation. Having decided to fight, the birds fight to the last pig.
Someone may find such a moral and such a plot too harsh and militaristic. But you can’t argue with the internal logic of “The Angry Birds Movie” – the piggies really deserved an epic thrashing. And it’s always nice to see films that break out of the general mold and don’t try to cram their plot into the Procrustean bed of politically correct clichés.