Worth: $17.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Kumail Nanjiani, Elizabeth Banks, Danny De Vito, Caspar Jennings, Tresi Gazal, Keegan Michael Keye, Awkwafina
Intro:
...a wonderfully colourful and entertaining delight.
It’s tricky, reductive and probably more than a little self-serving to spell out the ingredients to success in any film format or genre, but with animation, a host of epochal smash hits would seem to indicate that animated films work best when they’re short, sweet, funny, original, relatively simple, beautifully animated, and voiced to perfection, and not always by big names either. The best animated films of recent times – Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Happy Feet, Despicable Me, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Antz etc etc – appear to hit all these points, though there are obviously divergences in terms of animated hits (Inside Out, Zootopia, anything from Studio Ghibli). Migration – the new effort from burgeoning animation powerhouse Illumination, who have been killing it lately with the likes of the Sing and The Secret Life Of Pets films and the cracking The Super Mario Bros Movie – subscribes to all of these factors, and works very, very well as a result. It also achieves the pinnacle of animated movie success: parents won’t want to self-harm while watching it.
Migration is the simple story of a family of ducks – cautious, conservative dad Mack (Kumail Nanjiani); more adventurous mum Pam (the always on-point Elizabeth Banks); grumpy Uncle Dan (perfectly cast Danny De Vito); and kids Dax (Caspar Jennings) and Gwen (Tresi Gazal) – who have always been happy living in their own pond. A quick visit from another flock, however, prompts Mack to put aside his fears and migrate with his family to faraway Jamaica. Along the way, they tangle with a poultry-loving, hilariously hipster chef, a Jamaican parrot called Delroy (animation go-to Keegan Michael Keye has a ball with his Jamaican accent), and a streetwise New York pigeon called Chump (equally prevalent animation go-to Awkwafina is as supremely funny and spot-on as she always is), and get into all manner of risky and amusing adventures.
Packed with strong but simple storytelling, amusing references, surprisingly high stakes risk (a sequence featuring Carol Kane’s is-she-good-or-evil heron is particularly memorable), fun characters, straightforward, non-cloying messages, and entertaining set-pieces, Migration is a wonderfully colourful and entertaining delight.
