BEFORE: Yeah, it's an animation block, so I'll suffer through some movies made for kids if it means I can be current on this genre, it's my bread and butter, after all. Though I've never worked for a BIG animation studio, I do have friends and co-workers that have done that. I never felt the pull to burn my life down and go move out to L.A. and sell out by making silly movies for kids, but I get it, that's where the money is in this market - though these days, an animation studio can be anywhere, Blue Sky was up in Connecticut for a long time, from 1987 to 2019, but they sold out to Fox, which sold out to Disney. I know some of the creatives moved out to the West Coast, but the production stayed in the East. Anyway, that also proves that a bigger studio is just as likely to go belly-up as a small studio is. Every studio closes or gets bought or goes through layoffs at some point, really it's just a matter of time. Blue Sky had a good run, with 13 feature films and some shorts.
Both Awkwafina AND Keegan-Michael Key carry over from "IF".
THE PLOT: A family of ducks try to convince their overprotective father to go on the vacation of a lifetime.
AFTER: Finally, an animated film aimed at kids that sends the right message out to them, and that message is: if you want to go someplace fun on vacation, just keep pestering your parents until they take you there. Surely no harm can come from showing this happening in a duck family in a movie, right?
Mack Mallard is the father of the family, and he's portrayed as a needlessly over-protective sort who won't let his family leave the safety of their pond because there are so many things out in the larger world that can kill and eat ducks. And he's not wrong, the number one job a parent has is to make sure their kids don't die on their watch, and it's the source of all parental anxiety, except for the anxiety that comes from not wanting their kids to have sex and/or become pregnant. But mostly it's a primal fear thing, goes back to protecting the cave-bear clan from predators. Stay in your cave, sit by the fire, don't go anywhere unless you need to get milk, but come right back, because someday your parents will be old and you'll need to take care of them.
So migration is off the table for the Mallard family, who live somewhere in New England in a safe pond where migrating ducks stop each year to rest and maybe catch some fish before heading down to Jamaica. But the other ducks talk about that island like it's a magical place, and Mack's wife and kids desperately want to go. What changes Mack's mind is the loneliness of his Uncle Dan, who's never been anywhere, and has no mate, no other family. So the family flies off, and that's the start of this movie's "Everything Goes Wrong" storyline, starting with the fact that all the other ducks seem to be flying the other way. Well, the vacation's off to a great start, then, isn't it?
They find themselves in a rainy swamp, confronted by a large, goofy heron, which is a bird that Mack had always warned his family about as a potential duck-eater. After a nervous night in a shack with this female heron and her nearly-dead husband, the family finally learns to relax a bit, and their next stop on their journey south is New York City. Surely nothing can go wrong there, right? Uncle Dan argues with a flock of pigeons over a found sandwich, and Mallard matriarch Gwen has to step in and negotiate a peace settlement with their leader, Chump, who has a tendency to keep getting run over by city vehicles.
The pigeon can only give them directions to Jamaica, Queens, which is not really the same thing as the Caribbean island (although both places do sell beef patties, I can confirm). But she knows a macaw parrot originally from the tropics who knows the way to Jamaica, the only thing is that he lives in a cage in an apartment above a restaurant where the head chef serves a lot of, you guessed it, duck dinners. What are the odds? The Mallards can't steal the key to the cage without alerting the chef to their presence, but they do get the key, injure the chef and free the parrot.
OK, the trip is back on track, with directions and with a new guide, only after a bathroom break, the group of ducks find themselves adjacent to a duck farm, which seems like a true paradise, where ducks are fed all they can eat and they get massages and do yoga, and talk about ascending to paradise like some weird avian cult, and there's a spaceship coming from behind the comet. Really, what could go wrong here, unless someone is fattening up all the ducks for a reason and then a certain chef comes by to pick up his latest order of ducks for his restaurant. Again, what are the odds?
(I really hate to call a NITPICK POINT here, but would a very famous chef from New York really drive himself down to south Jersey or wherever just to hand-select the ducks for his restaurant? Most likely he'd send somebody, or just have them delivered, right? I also really hate to point this out, but the idyllic duck farm that is really anything BUT paradise seems to mimic the setting from "Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget". Just me?)
But the film needs a villain, and it needs to be somebody we'll remember and also somebody who would remember these ducks and have a grudge against them. After his ducks get away from him for a second time, the gloves are off and he gets in his special helicopter just to track down these birds and catch them again, because no, other ducks won't do, he has to have THESE ducks because he did pay for them before they escaped, I guess. And what celebrity chef doesn't have his own helicopter, I ask you? He's THAT good and THAT famous, and well, this does all sound a bit ridiculous, doesn't it?
The ducks do prevail and make it to Jamaica, and the mute and oddly-shaped famous chef gets his come-uppance, and if he's smart he'll stop cooking ducks and switch over to a vegetarian menu that won't fight back. Sure. And the Mallard family manages to find the exact ducks who visited their pond on the very large island of Jamaica, as you probably figured they would. And they also manage to set up a new quest for the sequel film, which is probably being planned if this one made money.
Well, I learned what a Pekin duck is today, which is different from a Peking duck, a famous dish in Chinese cuisine - that's a duck cooked a certain way to insure crispy skin. But a Pekin duck is a common breed of duck, the white ones, as opposed to mallards or Muscovys or other kinds. I had not heard of Pekin ducks before, but now I know what they're called, and I wonder if you can make Peking duck with a Pekin duck.
Carryovers Awkwafina and Keegan-Michael Key both have experience voicing birds in other animated films, they both were in "Storks" (did not see) and Awkwafina voiced a seagull in "The Little Mermaid", and Key also was in "The Angry Birds Movie", so I guess you can even get typecast doing voice acting.
I've got two more animated films to go in this chain, but it looks like I won't be able to get to "Inside Out 2" this year, or "Despicable Me 4" either. "Inside Out 2" just hit streaming, the other film has not, but I don't think the linking is there for either film, I just would not have been able to work them into this chain, not without massively overhauling it anyway, and my chain is set until Christmas, and I'd kind of like to keep it that way.
Also starring the voices of Kumail Nanjiani (last seen in "Money Shot: The Pornhub Story"), Elizabeth Banks (last seen in "Man on a Ledge"), Tresi Gazal, Caspar Jennings (last seen in "Operation Mincemeat"), Danny DeVito (last seen in "When In Rome"), Carol Kane (last seen in "Remembering Gene Wilder"), David Mitchell (last seen in "I Could Never Be Your Woman"), Isabela Merced (last seen in "Sweet Girl"),
RATING: 5 out of 10 salsa dancers
No comments:
Post a Comment