Stuck in a moment you can't get out of
There's no reason that Sing 2 had to be better than 2016's Sing. Illumination has gotten a lot of mileage out of putting absolutely no effort whatsoever into their movies, and their sequels have generally been the worst of a sorry lot. Not that I assume that the development meeting for Sing 2 started out with producer and studio head Chris Meledandri standing up at the table to announce, "you know what fellas, I think we should try making a good movie this time", because this is not, in point of fact "good". But the lesson they presumably should have learned from the first Sing is that stitching barely-formed scenes together with a near-constant application of pop songs performed by actors with unexceptional singing voices and/or singers with unexceptional acting skills really is all it takes to rake in some extremely large piles of cash (Sing is, after The Secret Life of Pets, the second-highest-grossing Illumination film outside of the Despicable Me universe). Sing 2 still has more needle drops than it can handle, and a lot of them are still performed by people who do a perfectly fine job of it, but, to its undeniable credit, it actually tries to stitch its scenes together with a clear, coherent, ongoing narrative, in which the multiple subplots are unified by something more than every character being in the same place at the same time. How wonderful that the first movie put me in a mental place where this actually does strike me as "an appreciable effort".
So, some number of years after the last movie ended, koala theater impresario Buster Moon (Matthew McConaughey) has shaped the band of misfits that formed back then into an ongoing musical concern. At the moment, they're just debuting their new jukebox musical version of Alice in Wonderland - actually, now that I ponder it, I'm not sure if these are preexisting songs in the Sing universe. That's certainly the implication of this film's climax, but I don't think it was implied in the first one. Anyways, the show begins with a flashy version of "Let's Go Crazy", the Prince song, largely I think because Alice in Wonderland is associated with the word "mad", so that's where we're at, cleverness-wise. This performance is especially important because in the audience is the famous and infamous Suki (Chelsea Peretti), a talent scout in the employ of media mogul Jimmy Crystal (Bobby Cannavale), who leaves midway through the show. With her goes all of Buster's dreams of performing in this universe's version of Las Vegas, Redshore City
.And it should absolutely not bother me so much that this universe's version of Las Vegas is called Redshore City, but I think it tells us something about how Sing 2 deals with world-building and joke-writing. Not that any person should assign themselves to the task of thinking, even for a moment, about the world-building in Sing 2, but one of the primary hallmarks of these two films has been their great facility at wasting opportunities to do, like, anything creative. The Sing universe is made up entirely of anthropomorphic animals who do all of the things that human beings do, and do them the way that human beings do them. There were, that I counted, three beats in the whole of Sing 2 that involved the characters being non-human: Buster's fuzzy face gets poofed up in air dryer, Meena the elephant (Tori Kelly grabs an ice cream cone with her trunk, and a lazy frog running a sound board flicks a switch with its tongue to avoid having to turn away from its newspaper. There are more if we include the extreme differences in the characters' relative sizes as a function of some of them being e.g. koalas and some of them being e.g. elephants. This was already a problem in 2016, and my feeling is that it's worse now, and it's spreading. Back to things like: Redshore City. It's not like every pseudo-Vegas needs to have a punny name on Vegas itelf. The name doesn't even need to be a joke. But "Redshore City" sounds like the unfortunately literal translation of the dialogue in a Japanese-produced video game. It has absolutely no personality, no life, not even a denotative meaning - Redshore City does not appear to be on any body of water.
Anyway, Buster and his colleagues travel to the city, and sneak into Crystal's office for auditions - he's an Arctic wolf, insofar as it matters. Here, they accidentally promise him a massive sci-fi musical extravaganza titled Out of This World and they also promise him that it will feature the return to live performance of the notoriously reclusive rock genius Clay Calloway (Bono), who went into hiding after his wife died. Clay's claim to fame, incidentally, was writing such songs as "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" and "Where the Streets Have No Name", so he's actually Bono. And that means that this film presents a world where Bono went into hiding, and one of the main plot threads is that they want to encourage him to come back. What a monstrous thing to do. At any rate, the show is thus funded, and Buster has to deal with all of the things standing between him and not getting it staged, which is what gives subplots to all the characters from the last film: Rosita the pig (Reese Witherspoon) is afraid of heights, which is a problem given that her number involves bungee jumping from the top of the theater to the bottom, and now Crystal's talentless daughter Porsha (Halsey) wants her part; Johnny the gorilla (Taron Egerton) can't dance, and the snooty proboscis monkey choreographer Kickenklober (Adam Buxton) is emotionally abusing him, until he gets help from a street dancing cat named Nooshy (Letitia Wright); Meena is embarrassed by having to kiss a handsome yak named Darius (Eric André) in her number, and she also has a crush on the elephant selling ice cream across the street, Alfonso (Pharrell Williams). All three of them have to learn the moving lesson "I dunno, can't you just be more confident?" Ash the porcupine (Scarlett Johansson) mostly escapes without having to learn any lesson, since her job is to coax Clay Calloway out of retirement, which she largely does by suggesting that, I dunno, can't he just be more confident?
The plots in Sing 2 are, now as before, absolutely nothing but a pretext to play a whole boatload of pop songs, some of them covered by the cast, some of them just the original recordings. And here we get to the other reason, besides "I can sort of parse the story this time", that Sing 2 is better than Sing: better production numbers. No better songs, nor better performances; but this time around, Jennings and his team of artists have created something at least mildly cooler to look at. Even better, they've positioned the best material at the very beginning and the very end: Alice in Wonderland and Out of This World both do a good job of splitting the difference between "this could actually be staged" and "this could only possibly exist in the unreality of animation". It's brightly colored, the virtual camera moves around with gay abandon, physical space is mostly respected but allowed to bend when it will make for neater stuff.
Pretty much all points in between are much worse; the film inherits a huge problem from its predecessor, some terribly ugly character designs that don't lead to much expressive animation. Nor just basic, "I don't hate my eyeballs for staring at this"-level visual appeal. Illumination hasn't yet made a film where the look really wowed me, and unlike every other American animation studio of note, they haven't really tried to evolve their style or technique very hard; Sing 2 looks very much like Sing in all particulars, despite being five years younger. And Sing isn't a very good-looking movie. But, I mean, they spent all that money on music clearances and a celebrity voice cast of whom only McConaughey and maybe Halsey, of all fucking people, actually give interesting vocal performances; why would an animated film need to spend more money on animation?
So, some number of years after the last movie ended, koala theater impresario Buster Moon (Matthew McConaughey) has shaped the band of misfits that formed back then into an ongoing musical concern. At the moment, they're just debuting their new jukebox musical version of Alice in Wonderland - actually, now that I ponder it, I'm not sure if these are preexisting songs in the Sing universe. That's certainly the implication of this film's climax, but I don't think it was implied in the first one. Anyways, the show begins with a flashy version of "Let's Go Crazy", the Prince song, largely I think because Alice in Wonderland is associated with the word "mad", so that's where we're at, cleverness-wise. This performance is especially important because in the audience is the famous and infamous Suki (Chelsea Peretti), a talent scout in the employ of media mogul Jimmy Crystal (Bobby Cannavale), who leaves midway through the show. With her goes all of Buster's dreams of performing in this universe's version of Las Vegas, Redshore City
.And it should absolutely not bother me so much that this universe's version of Las Vegas is called Redshore City, but I think it tells us something about how Sing 2 deals with world-building and joke-writing. Not that any person should assign themselves to the task of thinking, even for a moment, about the world-building in Sing 2, but one of the primary hallmarks of these two films has been their great facility at wasting opportunities to do, like, anything creative. The Sing universe is made up entirely of anthropomorphic animals who do all of the things that human beings do, and do them the way that human beings do them. There were, that I counted, three beats in the whole of Sing 2 that involved the characters being non-human: Buster's fuzzy face gets poofed up in air dryer, Meena the elephant (Tori Kelly grabs an ice cream cone with her trunk, and a lazy frog running a sound board flicks a switch with its tongue to avoid having to turn away from its newspaper. There are more if we include the extreme differences in the characters' relative sizes as a function of some of them being e.g. koalas and some of them being e.g. elephants. This was already a problem in 2016, and my feeling is that it's worse now, and it's spreading. Back to things like: Redshore City. It's not like every pseudo-Vegas needs to have a punny name on Vegas itelf. The name doesn't even need to be a joke. But "Redshore City" sounds like the unfortunately literal translation of the dialogue in a Japanese-produced video game. It has absolutely no personality, no life, not even a denotative meaning - Redshore City does not appear to be on any body of water.
Anyway, Buster and his colleagues travel to the city, and sneak into Crystal's office for auditions - he's an Arctic wolf, insofar as it matters. Here, they accidentally promise him a massive sci-fi musical extravaganza titled Out of This World and they also promise him that it will feature the return to live performance of the notoriously reclusive rock genius Clay Calloway (Bono), who went into hiding after his wife died. Clay's claim to fame, incidentally, was writing such songs as "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" and "Where the Streets Have No Name", so he's actually Bono. And that means that this film presents a world where Bono went into hiding, and one of the main plot threads is that they want to encourage him to come back. What a monstrous thing to do. At any rate, the show is thus funded, and Buster has to deal with all of the things standing between him and not getting it staged, which is what gives subplots to all the characters from the last film: Rosita the pig (Reese Witherspoon) is afraid of heights, which is a problem given that her number involves bungee jumping from the top of the theater to the bottom, and now Crystal's talentless daughter Porsha (Halsey) wants her part; Johnny the gorilla (Taron Egerton) can't dance, and the snooty proboscis monkey choreographer Kickenklober (Adam Buxton) is emotionally abusing him, until he gets help from a street dancing cat named Nooshy (Letitia Wright); Meena is embarrassed by having to kiss a handsome yak named Darius (Eric André) in her number, and she also has a crush on the elephant selling ice cream across the street, Alfonso (Pharrell Williams). All three of them have to learn the moving lesson "I dunno, can't you just be more confident?" Ash the porcupine (Scarlett Johansson) mostly escapes without having to learn any lesson, since her job is to coax Clay Calloway out of retirement, which she largely does by suggesting that, I dunno, can't he just be more confident?
The plots in Sing 2 are, now as before, absolutely nothing but a pretext to play a whole boatload of pop songs, some of them covered by the cast, some of them just the original recordings. And here we get to the other reason, besides "I can sort of parse the story this time", that Sing 2 is better than Sing: better production numbers. No better songs, nor better performances; but this time around, Jennings and his team of artists have created something at least mildly cooler to look at. Even better, they've positioned the best material at the very beginning and the very end: Alice in Wonderland and Out of This World both do a good job of splitting the difference between "this could actually be staged" and "this could only possibly exist in the unreality of animation". It's brightly colored, the virtual camera moves around with gay abandon, physical space is mostly respected but allowed to bend when it will make for neater stuff.
Pretty much all points in between are much worse; the film inherits a huge problem from its predecessor, some terribly ugly character designs that don't lead to much expressive animation. Nor just basic, "I don't hate my eyeballs for staring at this"-level visual appeal. Illumination hasn't yet made a film where the look really wowed me, and unlike every other American animation studio of note, they haven't really tried to evolve their style or technique very hard; Sing 2 looks very much like Sing in all particulars, despite being five years younger. And Sing isn't a very good-looking movie. But, I mean, they spent all that money on music clearances and a celebrity voice cast of whom only McConaughey and maybe Halsey, of all fucking people, actually give interesting vocal performances; why would an animated film need to spend more money on animation?
