I wandered into the living room to check out the images that accompanied it, and they showed a large theatrical space with an audience of adoring animals, some of who might have been flicking lighters to light up the darkness around them. There were animals on stage too of course, clearly fighting whatever demons the sequel's narrative had asked them to fight, and singing the iconic lyrics to that iconic song.
There was no other dialogue of any kind in the trailer, just a few other equally promising snippets of footage.
Then and there, I thought to myself, "Could Sing 2 contain multitudes of unexpected greatness?"
It didn't seem likely, but I've heard of stranger things.
Our subsequent viewing of Sing seem to further discourage the possibility.
When my son was equally taken in by the trailer and said he wanted to see the movie with me, and I felt hopeful enough by the trailer to instantly agree with this request, I knew then that we first had to watch the original. I mean, we didn't have to -- you can usually piece together what you need to know about these movies -- but it felt right to. I had never purposely ignored the original Sing, but it landed at an age when the younger one was too young to see it (he would have been almost three) and the older one was already growing out of it (age six, although it seems strange to say that now that I'm typing it). I suspect the bigger hindrance to seeing it was its December 21st release date, meaning I would have needed to prioritize watching it in among all the other end-of-year content I'd have been trying to consume.
So a few weekends later we did sit down to watch the original, renting it from iTunes when it was surprisingly not available on any of our streaming services. I thought it was fine, but certainly not remarkable. My son seemed to like it more than that, but he may have been trying to stay polite and positive, just as I was. Later on -- as in, yesterday -- I'd discover that he hadn't thought the original was all that.
Our lukewarm reactions to Sing did nothing to derail our intentions to see the sequel in the theater, and that opportunity finally arose -- as the movie's showtimes were quickly dwindling -- yesterday. His brother was off at a four-day summer camp, so now was the time.
Wow.
That's all I can say: Wow.
I'm not going to go on at length about Sing 2, but it's a major step forward for Illumination, bursting with color and imagination and even some ideas. It's leaps and bounds more satisfying than the original and at times it put me in mind of Zootopia, which made my best of the last decade list. A world populated by peacefully coexisting animals would obviously put you in mind of that, and Sing would have probably been accused of ripping off Zootopia had they not been released in the same year. What I'm really talking about, though, is the creativity that has gone into building the city where much of the Sing 2 action takes place, which is modeled after Las Vegas but has oodles of outstanding flourishes that are all its own. The level of depth and detail that has gone into conceiving and realizing this world is just astonishing.
And yes, I think having seen the first Sing really helped, for a number of reasons.
Had we not watched that movie, I think both my son and myself would have forgotten how taken we'd been with the Sing 2 trailer. I would have reminded myself that mainstream animation not made by Disney or Pixar is usually a disappointment, and I might have seen it five years from now if ever -- the same amount of time it took me to watch the original Sing. That would have deprived me of what could well be my favorite animated movie of the year.
Having watched that movie, though, created a sort of fallacy of sunk costs. Like, we've already seen the original so if we don't see the sequel, that original viewing would have been preparing us for nothing.
But also, getting to know these characters in the first movie was, I think, key to appreciating their journeys in the second movie as much as I did. The most emotional moments may relate to a reclusive singing great, with the body of a lion and the voice of Bono, who was not a character in the original movie. Still, it was another character's relationship to that lion -- Ash, the porcupine, voice of Scarlett Johannson -- that drew out the poignancy of that new character. And the tight script found satisfying narrative arcs for all the other characters we met the first time around.
Plus this movie has a really good sense of humor. There's a batty old lizard voiced by the director himself, Garth Jennings, though the character is female, kind of like an eccentric secretary to the main character (the koala, Buster Moon, voice of Matthew McConaughey). When she drives a rented Ferrari convertible along back roads to seek out the reclusive musician -- who has been promised by Moon to appear in his space-themed musical -- she is singing and bopping along with System of a Down's "Chop Suey." ("Wake up! [indistinguishable indistinguishable] "make up!" etc.) It's been a while since I've laughed that hard.
And then when the staging of that space musical finishes off the movie -- containing most of the footage we saw in that trailer -- it was like the exact realization of that trailer's original promise. Have you ever heard of the phrase "spectacle tears"? As in, something in a movie is so filled with spectacle that you can't help but get a little verklemt?
Yeah well, Sing 2 did that for me too.
It's just another reminder that you shouldn't blow off any movie out there. Until you see it, you never know whether its praises might be worth singing.
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