With Sing 2, writer/director Garth Jennings and his A-list cast have created an animated spectacle to rival the glory days of the Ziegfeld Follies, those eye-popping, cast-of-thousands song-and-dance spectaculars of yester-millennium. If the sight of hundreds of flamingos doing synchronized skating doesn’t make you smile, I am sorry you are having such an abysmally awful day.
Flamingos aside, the irreverent, heartwarming (for real), and chortle-inducing tale of ambitious koala Buster Moon (Matthew McConaughey) and the animal band he brings to the biggest stage in Redshore City (read: Vegas) is a hoot whether your history with animated film dates back to 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or 2016’s Sing the first. In other words, Sing 2 is the rare movie made for children that won’t have their adults grinding their teeth and scrolling their Insta minutes in.
The plot is basically, “Hey kids, let’s put on a show!,” but with marvelously anthropomorphized animals and Vegas-worthy production values. As in Sing, Jennings’s musical selections are hilariously on point. “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” brings out the Big Emotions in Buster, while the upbeat “Let’s Go Crazy” is maniacally good fun. Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy,” meanwhile, is deployed with a context that’ll have you giggle-snorting.
In addition to McConaughey’s can-do koala, the menagerie includes Bono as a rock star who hasn’t performed in decades and Bobby Cannavale as a wolf/entertainment industry powermonger. As a mother pig with more children than RuPaul, Reese Witherspoon shows the awesome power of a few hundred piglets unleashed for the greater good.
As for the show Buster Moon and his team (also including Tori Kelly as an adorable elephant and Taron Egerton as a sweet gorilla) pull off, it’s terrific. Here’s hoping this will be the rare franchise that continues to get better with each installment. PG, 112 minutes.
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