look, sing 2...

I notice I blog more often than not about problems i had with kids films.

I must precede everything here with the fact that, watching sing 2 at the cinema, I didnt find it unwatchable. It wasnt Sonic levels of bad. I watched it, and didnt wish I was outside in the foyer cafe. So, well done, crew! Now, onto what I hated about it:

bad hands
There have been strides taken towards realistic hand motions in cartoons in recent years, primarily by the dreaded Disney. Merida's incredible bow work in Brave is gorgeous, Coco features hands playing exquisite guitar rendered so well that watching it was as joyful as seeing it in the flesh. Movies have long struggled with actors miming playing an instrument badly, their hands all over the place in a mockery of musicianship. Even dubbing in real hands playing the instrument, as jarring as it can be, is better than the lack of any effort at all. 

So Sing 2 really dropped the ball here; the characters who played instruments did so with no regards for actual notes, chord positions, timing or anything, which was a real disappointment after the standard had been raised so high. Even if the mouse has the budgets to ensure those details are provided for and other studios don't, this should have been a priority.

Stupid song system
There seems to be an unwritten rule in this film - cant remember if it's true of the first one - that each song can only be used once. This made the end of the film absolutely stall because at once, songs they had already used to great effect - like the improvised chorus of 'streets have no name' - dont return to cap the arc of the film off, and all the songs in the show at the end have had no foreshadowing of their existence, making all the rehearsals seem really weird because what they ended up performing wasn't what you'd been watching them perform for the preceding hour.

Don’t mean to bring up Disney again but - honestly - one of the great things about Encanto is the repetition of motifs. Songs reference each other, you have set ups and payoffs and melodies intertwining. obviously you can't do that in a juke box musical, but you could have teased those other songs, played around with the melodies, maybe played a snippet of the first verse, showed how this one bit was tricky so they keep getting it wrong but it all goes ok on the night. 

Related to this, at the end, I had a problem with mummy pig singing the chorus from Taylor Swift's "look what you made me do".
Because that chorus is co-credited to Right Said Fred, as it bears a resemblance to their song "I'm too sexy"
And right said fred are anti-vaxxers
And therefore sing 2 is funding anti vaxxers
And I hate that I know this trivia
And i hate sing 2 even more for making me hate myself.

Jonny's dancing arc
Right so the arc that Jonny the piano player had in the first film was a bit billy elliot; he wanted to be an elton john, and his rough and tumble family of east end mobsters had to come to accept this. In this film, his arc is that the hare-brained scheme that's been hastily written has him not playing piano and singing, but instead performing a stage-combat-stick-dance, which he finds himself unable to cope with. Hes not a dancer! That's not his talent!
Now this sets up an arc that he's going to have to tell the boss that the idea was stupid, he's not playing to his strengths, and a dancer is not who he truly is. Hes being forced into becoming something that he's not.
But that doesnt happen. Jonny finds a street dancer who - in three weeks - sorts him out and makes him into a fantastic dancer, to the chagrin of his official teacher, who apparently enjoyed seeing him fail.
AND THEN
The dance teacher is so outraged at seeing him succeed, that he dance-attacks him during the performance; jonny comes back and dance-beats him; and floored, the teacher looks up and smiles at his student like that was his plan all along.
Ugh.

I suppose this is trying to be a sort-of-kid-friendly Whiplash athough I've not seen it so I dont know the details. I dont like that the message isn't play to your strengths, know yourself, and be true to yourself, but instead seems to contradict Jonny's arc in the first film. The message seems to be that anybody can be anything they're told to be; jonny acts puzzled when told he's going to dance in the show, it doesnt come from him. He spent the first film rebelling against peoples expectations  and the second film suppressing his talent and conforming to them.  And because of the 'only sing each song once 'rule,  when we get to the end he *does* perform a song on the piano, which there has been no sight or sound of him doing because the film doesn't allow songs to be used more than once.
Just by shifting this from a dance to an extraordinarily difficult piece to play - taking jonnys actual talents, and raising them to the next level - this whole section could have worked, as I aluded to earlier with the foreshadowing of songs that never happens in the film. They could still have had an antagonistic teacher whose methods didnt work, but the drive could have come from jonny himself. Or, they could have stuck with the dance, but could have found a way to incorporate Jenny's actual talents into the performance, rather than making him into something that hes not. But what we had was... muddled.

While i like the message that having a teacher who has a decent relationship with their students is important, the film then undermines this potentially good message with macho bullshit when the pupil defeats the teacher, seemingly proving his methods correct. Bad!

All the other characters seem to have a decent arc: mummy pig overcomes her fear of heights, elephant girl finds love and inspiration for her acting, porcupine woman emotionally connects with a reclusive star but not in a creepy way (tbh I'm not sure if this counts as an arc for herself, or it's just another case of women doing emotional labour for men - which is maybe quite realistically depicted?).  It’s just Jonny who’s arc is not really related to anything he wants to do. Oh, and the german pig, he’s just there. He doesn’t really achieve anything except ‘be wacky’.

re-iplementing an animal-based segration system that the muppets seemd to avoid
Sing - a bunch of animals putting on a song and dance revue - is obviously reminiscent of the muppets, and while I'm not going to accuse it of being a copy (it's not, it's more influenced by reality talent contests) it's a shame that species of animal in this film only seem to have relationships with their matching species, so much that when Meena sees another elephant, regardless of him being nice and stuff, the fact that he is just another elephant - implied that this is coded indian -  is enough for him to be a relationship tease. And that's really retrograde, isn't it? The connotations of that - that there is a right type/race for different people - are something totally ignored by The Muppets, where pigs love frogs and gonzos love chickens. and there's a surfeit of options for how this can work; The Great Muppet Caper has Fozzy and Kermit being brothers, with a frog-bear hybrid for a father; 

 

Muppet christmas carol has kermit and piggy's children being a mixture of male frogs and female pigs. So, why have this film be so segratated? what does that teach our children, especially if the animals are coded for ethnicities?

Absent Mothers
As with most of this type of film, there are several absent mothers. Mummy pig is the only mum in the film. There are several other dads in the film with entirely no mention of their mums - the wolf family and the gorilla family, off the top of my head. I bring this up all the time though, so I'm not going to dwell on it here.

BONO
right so, my biggest problem with this film is Bono, his character, and his songs.

During the audition that kicks the plot of the film off, the characters improvise an accapella rendition of 'the streets have no name', by popular rock band U2. It's a good (if simple) song from a good (if simple) album. absolutely cracking production team on that record (the joshua tree). two of the u2 songs from the film come from that record, and the other one is the 2000 song 'stuck in a moment' which suits the moment it's used for in the film quite well.

SO firstly, we hear that in-universe that song was written not by U2, but by someone called 'clay calloway'. now. Now now now. if you put a 'legendary' character in a film, about singing and dancing, and call them [something alliterative] Calloway, I'm going to assume that's a reference to Cab Calloway, the legendary song and dance man. if you call this character 'Clay', i'm going to hear assume that's a reference to Cassius Clay, who changed his name to muhammed ali, another alliteratve and legendary performer of the 20th century, praised for being the spiritual father of rap: he "played a role in the shaping of the black poetic tradition, paving the way for The Last Poets in 1968, Gil Scott-Heron in 1970, and the emergence of rap music in the 1970s."

Now you might have noticed that these legendary performers from the 20th century were both black men. Perhaps coincidentally, the character of Clay Calloway is a lion, an animal from Africa. and I was therefore surprised when the character turned out to be played by a white Irish man. NOW. maybe if you haven't heard of either of these real-life Americans, you might imagine that Clay Calloway sounds like a very Irishy kind of name, so I can forgive that; but that wasn’t my experience.

ok so anyway everyone's all over the idea of getting the reclusive Calloway out of retirement to play again. all the characters go on about how amazing his songs are. songs that he really wrote. I mean, songs that bono really wrote (or co-wrote, which according to Damon Albarn, is a totally different thing and much lesser, and something he would *never* do). Bonio plays a character who, in-universe, wrote all the U2 songs, and everyone in the film goes on about how great his actual songs are, how much they meant to everyone. No-one says 'eh, they're kind of ok I guess', like everyone I know's opinion of U2. Also Calloway wrote all his songs inspired by his long-dead lady lion, and he hasn't played or written since she died. I guess you could say he's "stuck in the moment and can't get out of it". Would have been great if his long-dead partner had been played by The Edge, and the reason why he didn't do music anymore was because he couldn't move on from their collaborations. would have been nice to have some sort of LGBT+ representation in either film in the series. It wouldn't be hard, given that Jonny is played by the actor who played Elton John in Rocket Man, and Jonny is obviously moddeled after Elton John; tvTropes has Jonny as 'ambiguously gay' but there's really nothing to hint this other than who he is modelled after and the fact that he's a bit gentle. [shrug emoticon]. That's sort of more cringe than just not doing anything at all, somehow. So maybe I’m wrong and they shouldn’t try after all.

Sing doesn't really seem to have dealt with the idea of songwriters before; songs just 'exist' as a free resource to be sung over - there are no bands in the films, just backing tracks. When Ash the porcupine is playing a show, it's just her and a drum machine, although she is an 'authentic' song writer. for a film about music and performance, the writing process of music is almost totally ignored - except here, where it's bowdlerised as an entirely solo, emotionally responsive activity. The composition of the music for this song in particular, according to wikipedia, didn’t just come from an emotional place; it came from hard work, experimentation, practice, and Brian Eno dicking around.

This feels very odd to me. It would be fine if Bono was playing a song-writer, but the songs they wrote in-universe were all written by other people; or if Calloway was played by an actor, but all of the songs were written by the same person/group. This is how the other characters work; Ash's songs weren't written by voice-actor Scarlett Johannsen (who is not even a porcupine). But what we have is Bono playing a fictional version of himself - because he did write (co-write) those songs - being lauded by all the other characters for his great songs. It just feels a bit incestuous, like a big advert for U2, it felt uncomfortable. like, we need to get the kids listening to U2 again, because all their fans are old, so let's stuff this kids movie full of old U2 songs and get mr U2 to act in it and all the characters keep talking about how great these songs are.
This goes beyond stunt casting; it feels like product placement. Actually, that’s exactly what it is, and maybe that’s why I find it difficult.

And yet again, I must come back to the way that Sing divorces the songs from any source of meaningful context. Because upon reading up on 'stuck in the moment', I find that Bono wrote the words about his late friend Michael Hutchence, of the band INXS.  It had meaning, once; "It's a row between mates. You're kinda trying to wake them up out of an idea. In my case it's a row I didn't have while he was alive. I feel the biggest respect I could pay to him was not to write some stupid soppy song, so I wrote a really tough, nasty little number, slapping him around the head. And I'm sorry, but that's how it came out of me."Well I really like that, and the self-effacing irony of 'this is what I should have said to you'. It's kind of an admission of his own failings and how much that hurt. It feels a shame then that the song is set to a very light piece of music, that really undermines the sentiment; or at least sugar-coats it, resulting in an easily-transmissable pop song that perhaps will help that sentiment be transmitted further (trying to do some brain maths now of how if you dilute a message, but it reaches more people, does it have more of a total impact?). It feels a bit Candle in the Wind to recycle one mourning for another.
 

Right, that does it, i’m off.

PS System of A Down are used diagetically in the film but don't appear on the soundtrack. booooo