Featherweight
If only ‘Migration’ had jokes that were as intricately crafted as its artwork.
Migration
Director: Benjamin Renner • Writer: Mike White
Starring [English]: Kumail Nanjiani, Elizabeth Banks, Caspar Jennings, Tresi Gazal, Keegan-Michael Key, Awkwafina, Danny DeVito
USA • 1hr 23mins
Opens Hong Kong February 8 • I
Grade: B-
Mack Mallard (Kumail Nanjiani) is an anxious drake and husband to the lovely hen Pam (Elizabeth Banks), living in a tranquil pond in… upstate New York? New England? Something like that. When we meet Mack at the beginning of Migration, he’s telling his kids, curious Dax (Caspar Jennings) and budding psychopath Gwen (Tresi Gazal) a story about the world beyond the pond. According to Mack, the world is full of death, destruction, violence and sorrow, and it’s no place they want to be because everything also wants to eat them. Now, none of this is particularly untrue. The world is a shitshow these days, and in Hong Kong a goodly number of people do want some duck on the plate (that’s giving me ideas for dinner). But as Pam sees it, Mack is putting such fear into them he’s shortening their horizons and baking ignorance into their lives. When a family of ducks migrating south for the winter – to Jamaica – stops for a break in Mack’s pond, he rudely turns down their offer to join them on the journey, infuriating Pam, disappointing the kids (Dax met a nice girl duck and got all horned up) and compelling curmudgeonly Uncle Dan (Danny DeVito) to lay down some elder’s wisdom. Mack is going to lose his family if he doesn’t loosen up. Off they go to Montego Bay.
This is not dinner
I’m about to repeat myself: You’ve seen this movie before. Migration is one of those animated family adventures that’s entirely unchallenging storywise and it absolutely will not offend anybody so it’s perfect around the time of big, sloppy family holidays. It opened at Christmas overseas (it’s made serious bank too, nearly US$225 million), and it opens at the biggest holiday of the year here. Smart. Thing is it’s kind of dull too, and not nearly as funny as it thinks it is – or as it should be. I hate the Minions with the passion of 1,000 fiery suns, but the short Minions film that precedes this, Mooned, is pound for pound a funnier film than Migration.
Which is surprising given Migration’s pedigree. Director Benjamin Renner has been down this road before: his heist comedy Ernest & Celestine was about a mouse who was afraid of the outside world and a grizzly who helps her conquer that fear, and is essentially the same story – just more charming. Writer Mike White is best know as The White Lotus (!) white privilege satirist extraordinaire, but he also penned an episode of Thomas & Friends as well as the crime against humanity that was The Emoji Movie. Someone please share what that guy smoking. Emoji aside, he knows pithy comedy, and Nanjiani is a master of the slow verbal burn so he has his moments. There’s just not enough of either from both.
But Migration accomplishes the mission it set out to accomplish – and in 83 minutes! It sends all the right messages about the value of learnt empathy and lived experience, how easy it is to fall into the traps set by pre-conceived ideas – and of course how your family is your strength blah blah blah. Awkwafina turns up (because of course she does) as Chump the angry city pigeon, for a lesson on the intersection of class and race bias, and Keegan-Michael Key plays Delroy, a homesick Jamaican macaw that guides the Mallards to the land of ganj after they spring him from (essentially) forced labour in a Manhattan restaurant. The chef from hell (the overbearing chef is taking over from the finance bro as contemporary films’ preferred bad guy) storyline gets tired fast and Migration’s final act would have been better served with less of him.
This is an Illumination film, which means it has its visual highlights, most of which are rendered as irritating because they’re just that: moments. Why not keep it up? The featherwork (is that a thing?) is incredible, and looks like if you reached out and touched it would be silky soft. The textured land- and cityscapes and rich light and shadow are, in a word, gorgeous. The magic hour in the pond is a transporting gold that matches anything Pixar can lay down. The clever horror genre play that sent the Mallards to the haunted mansion of Erin the heron (Carol Kane) on a dark and stormy night, complete with creaking floors and hard expressionist shadows, was truly inspired. More of that could have sent Migration soaring – and proven the film’s point as much as its rote dialogue. C’mon, guys. Live a little. — DEK