The Angry Birds Movie 2 Review
PG: Rude humor and action
Studios: Columbia Pictures, Rovio Animation, Sony Pictures Animation
Run Time: 1 Hour and 37 Minutes
Director: Thurop Van Orman | Screenwriters: Peter Ackerman, Eyal Podell, Jonathon E. Stewart
Voice Cast: Jason Sudeikis, Josh Gad, Leslie Jones, Bill Hader, Rachel Bloom, Awkwafina, Sterling K. Brown, Eugenio Derbez, Danny McBride, Peter Dinklage
Release Date: August 13, 2019
The flightless angry birds and the scheming green piggies take their beef to the next level in The Angry Birds Movie 2! When a new threat emerges that puts both Bird and Pig Island in danger, Red (Jason Sudeikis), Chuck (Josh Gad), Bomb (Danny McBride), and Mighty Eagle (Peter Dinklage) recruit Chuck's sister Silver (Rachel Bloom) and team up with pigs Leonard (Bill Hader), his assistant Courtney (Awkwafina), and techpig Garry (Sterling K. Brown) to forge an unsteady truce and form an unlikely superteam to save their homes.
Rarely does a sequel happen to surpass its predecessor. Many tend to fail, especially in the field of animation due to the lack of decent storytelling (often times retreading the same elements as the first film), meaningless pop culture references to pander to younger audiences, or the removal of all the charm that made the first film special. Yes, a few sequels do achieve at being a valuable installment for a franchise, such as the Toy Story movies, but even Pixar has failed at this before with Cars 2 and Finding Dory, the latter never reaching the same heights as the original beloved film. It’s even more rare for a mediocre animated movie to deliver a sequel that marginally leaps and bounds over its predecessor. Well, in the case of The Angry Birds Movie 2, it slingshots straight past the film that came before it, making it one of the best surprises of the summer, one of the greatest video game movies of all time, and one of the better animated films of the year.
I have a list of “bests” that this movie qualifies for and I wholeheartedly mean every single word of it.
What started as a chaotic, destructive war between the birds and the pigs has now turned into a prank war between the enemies. But when a new challenger appears and threatens both Bird and Pig Island, Leonard, leader of the pigs, pleads for a truce with the birds. While the angry, yet mostly cynical, Red rebuffs his request out of skepticism (and slightly for his own selfish desire to maintain the hero status on his island), his friends Chuck and Bomb willingly go for it. Now they must recruit a team to embark on this journey to save their islands.
Despite whatever a film adaptation may be based on -- whether it be video games, comic books, or TV shows -- what makes them valuable and sometimes remarkable is how the filmmaker who helms it brings their distinctive signature to the property. The perfect example of this is director Taika Waititi who brought his charmingly colorful and quirky sense of humor that was beloved in his indie features to the MCU with Thor: Ragnarok, which turned the titular character -- whose films were always the runt of the MCU litter -- into one of their best. Now, one of the major factors that makes The Angry Birds Movie 2 a transformative surprise is the direction from renowned animator Thurop Van Orman making his directorial debut. If that name sounds familiar, then let this gif give you a hint about who he is:
You can just hear this gif.
The voice and the creator of the Emmy Award-winning Cartoon Network animated series, The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack was brought on to helm this sequel. For this being Van Orman’s first 3D project and his directorial debut, he pulls a Genndy by translating his distinctively offbeat, silly, and unapologetically bizarre sense of humor found in his most notable 2D animation works into the world of computer animation and asserting it as his own. When describing the style of comedy he’s fond of, Van Orman once said, “The kind of comedy I like are the ones that make you feel a bit uncomfortable and then hit you with a great joke.” The style of humor that could be found in Flapjack is the same exact kind of humor that’s demonstrated in Angry Birds Movie 2. Exhibiting silly slapstick, quick-paced visual gags that are unpredictable and deranged, and inspired physical comedy that is well-paced and inventive are a few of the many reasons why this is one of the best comedies of the summer.
Completely produced by Sony Pictures Animation this time around, The Angry Birds Movie 2 maintains the same bright and colorful visuals as the predecessor with slightly more touched-up details in its beautiful animation. Because the story has more free rein than just slapping the exact same concept from its source material, there are an ample amount of new locations and a variety of new characters that are non-existent in the games with distinguishable designs that are perfectly aligned with the voice cast’s performances.
The narrative could’ve been totally disregarded, like how a lot of animated sequels are only focused on telling nothing but jokes, but even from a storytelling standpoint, the story is poignant and surprisingly more complex than expected. This time the arc primarily centers on Red’s toxic masculinity and his incapability to diverge his ego and open up to input from others, especially with the recruitment of Silver (Rachel Bloom), an adept science genius and sister to Chuck whose helpful ideas threaten his narrow-minded perspective. In a year where toxic masculinity is the topical theme that apparently every movie wants to discuss, this expresses its message thoroughly with hilarious cutaways to Red’s inner imagination or sympathetic past of being an outcast throughout life, resulting in him lashing out or deflecting ideas to avoid being lonely. Then, one of the deeper narrative points comes from the antagonist Zeta (portrayed by a hilarious and charismatic Leslie Jones), a tall, purple, sassy, and self-made bird with a spiky tooth whose quest for world domination isn’t driven by power, but by self care. Once you find out Zeta’s motivation, you can’t help but go:
While the first Angry Birds movie was something that I personally enjoyed, everyone can admit that one of the flaws it had was how it felt so restricted by its source material and tried to incorporate the gameplay into the story. What benefits this sequel from the get-go is how the talented team of animators and screenwriters were willing to go completely off course and make this installment their own by telling a fun story that barely resembles its source with a wide array of humor, making it completely refreshing.
Even though the story isn’t the primary trajectory, as the main focus is delivering a relentless barrage of jokes at rapidfire speed, the film succeeds by acting as a complete showcase of Van Orman’s signature perspective of comedy in an existing property that he makes his own delivering nothing but hard-earned laughs all the way through. Even if you perceive them as scattershot, for not all of the jokes land, the ones that do have you rolling in laughter more than most of 2019’s comedies. There is a sequence of silent physical comedy where the birds and pigs must disguise themselves in a defective eagle costume to infiltrate Zeta’s base, which leads them to an awkward encounter in a restroom, and by God it’s one of the most hilarious and memorable comedic sequences of the year. I’m not kidding when I say that I haven’t laughed this hard at a movie in a theater since Booksmart, which is my definitive comedy of 2019. Even when it deviates to a subplot regarding three hatchlings who must retrieve their eggs, there is no faulting it, for even that gets unapologetically weirder and more twisted than the main storyline. On the surface, you can perceive it as a meaningless subplot similar to the role of the minions in the Despicable Me movies, but as it progresses, their adventure becomes more hilarious by incorporating an unpredictable gag that succeeds in terms of laughs. Heck, I might say they rival sidekick characters such as the Minions and Scrat, which is ironic considering this is from one of the producers whose resume includes both Despicable Me and Ice Age, so that influence is presented here in a new humorous light.
Thurop Van Orman does with Angry Birds as Waititi did with Thor: deliver his distinctive voice to an existing property, expressing the skillful versatility he inhabits as a creative animator-turned-director. Truly, it’s remarkable to see Sony Pictures Animation come in and allow big and notable animators that spearheaded a defining era of 21st century animation to create their own features with their signature take. We’ve seen it with Genndy Tartakovsky with his financially successful Hotel Transylvania series, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller with Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, and just recently, the Academy Award-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. This continues Sony’s surprising return/winning streak after the tragedy that was their 2017 slate, justifying their place as a threatening competitor to the other animation studios in the industry.
THE ANGRY BIRDS MOVIE 2 is a marginal improvement of a follow-up that slingshots past its predecessor to a new height. Delivering a frantically-paced onslaught of offbeat, silly, and unapologetically bizarre jokes that stamps the style of first-time feature director Thurop Van Orman, this offers a candy-colored burst of enjoyment throughout.
Rating: 4/5 | 83%
