I seriously had started to doubt Illumination's movies after the disaster known as "Minions". I really had lost my appeal in their movies and "The Secret Life of Pets" didn't help me win them back. "Sing" on the other hand, did. This movie is very well crafted, fun, funny and overall a good movie.
The story is about a koala who owns a theater named Buster Moon (Mathew McConaughey). He's struggling to keep his theater open and pay the bills so he figures, if he holds a singing competition, he can bring back the crowds. He plans to give out a $1,000 prize to the winner, but an error makes it seem that the prize is $100,000. The competition quickly spreads around town and Moon selects the best singers. An overworked mother pig named Rosita (Reese Witherspoon) who is partnered with a crazier pig named Gunter (Nick Kroll), a teenage porcupine rock star named Ash (Scarlett Johansen) who is trying to get over a breakup, a gorilla named Johnny (Taron Egerton) who does not want to be part of his fathers gang, a shy and stage fright elephant named Meena (Tori Kelly), and an arrogant mouse (Seth MacFarlane).
One of the things that I really enjoyed about this movie was all the characters. They're all very likable and the actors who play them have really good singing voices and the film doesn't even use auto-tune at all (unlike "Trolls"). Another thing that I did enjoy was the animation which is really good and is mostly laid back, unlike Illumination's previous movies. The story is also really well written, for the most part. There are some jokes in the movie that aren't really funny, but they're very rare and I also thought the story kind of went back and forth as it seems some certain scenes weren't tied together well. And, yeah, let's talk about the similarities that this movie has to "Zootopia". The film really didn't need to be composed of anthropomorphic animals. In fact, if you made them humans I think only one line would change and that's it. The city they live in also seems unnatural for the animals. In "Zootopia", the city looks like a city that animals built and would live in, the city in "Sing" looks more like a Southern California city, but if you ask me those are nitpicks.
All in all, "Sing" is a very good movie and I definitely had a fun time. I definitely enjoyed this movie and certainly recommend it. It's not a great movie, but I don't think it's supposed to be. I think it was only supposed to be a nice simple animated film and I definitely plan on watching it again.
