This entry was posted on Monday, April 9th, 2007 at 5:01 pm and is filed under Animation, Comedy, Family, S. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Director: Ash Brannon, Chris Buck
Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Jeff Bridges, Zooey Deschanel, James Woods, Jon Heder, Diedrich Bader,
The animated feature, Surf’s Up started with a unique premise. It is partially a narrative story, and partially a mockumentry. I don’t see many animated features, since I have no vocally gifted, but self-control challenged ankle biters in my home to gently persuade me to make that kind of movie choice. This film, however, is not an unpleasant 85 minutes. It starts slow, but soon offers some absolutely amazing water CGI, a few classic tunes and a decent story, that is interesting enough, but could have used some punching up in the humour department.
Shia LaBeouf (Disturbia) provides the voice of Cody Maverick, a young penguin who dreams of winning the biggest penguin surfing competition of the year. His pursuit of this goal is the chosen subject of documentary makers who interview, him, his friends and surfing fans along the way. This is kinda cool, but is also a disturbing celebration of our media/fame-obsessed culture, but what the hell, its just a kids movie. Anyway, in his travels, he hooks up with a surfing chicken (voice by Jon Heder), is smitten by a beautiful, penguin lifeguard (Zooey Deschanel) and finds both an enemy (Bader) and a mentor (Bridges, who is great, sorta reprising his ‘Dude’ character from THe Big Lebowski) and passes on the message that we should do what we love, because we love it, not because we want to win at it. That kinda struck home with me, sitting here writing my 150th review for free. No tears, please. Just send money.
This is not a bad flick, if you have some bouncy giggle machines that need to be entertained for a couple of hours, or if you really love surfing, I guess. It is just a little z-boysish, which is a good thing, but enough of the chatter, dudes, are we going to hit some waves, or what?
