MIGRATION

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9 Apr 2024

APRIL 9, 2024 THEFILM.BLOG LEAVE A COMMENT
★★
If there’s one film certain to make an easy billion at the 2024 box office it’s Despicable Me 4, the latest in Illumination’s six-feature-strong string of massive hits. Minions make money. Lots and lots and lots of it. First though, comes a rarer thing. Migration is Illumination’s first original offering in eight years, sweeping into screens on the back of a girthy run of sequels, remakes and video game adaptations. Visually speaking, the film delights. Directed by French cartoonist Benjamin Renner, Migration is Illumination’s cheapest but most dazzling animation in a decade. In all other respects, it’s a monumental bore.
That’s no overstatement. The sheer lack of originality and imagination in a script by White Lotus creator Mike White is, in itself, remarkable. It comes to something when an on-form Danny DeVito can’t even enliven leaden dialogue and inept pacing. He voices batty Uncle – ‘wake me up when it’s my turn to be eaten’ – Dan, a layabout mallard of minimal input. DeVito can’t have spent longer than a day in the booth. More centrally, Kumail Nanjiani plays Mack Mallard, the anxious father of Dax (Caspar Jennings) and Gwen (Tresi Gazal) and husband to the long-suffering Pam, who is voiced by an eighty-six minute suffering Elizabeth Banks. Carol Kane voices a Great Blue Heron, Awkwafina a gangster pigeon and David Mitchell a yogic American Pekin called GooGoo. There’s real talent here.
When a migrating flock of ducks pit stop in the Mallard family’s New England pond – gorgeously rendered and against a fabulous painterly backdrop – talk of a winter in Jamaica piques the beaks of Pam and the kids. Mack is less keen but convention, rather than realism, dictates he must change his mind within about five minutes. Flying south, the family come a cropper in New York and at a restaurant that specialises in duck. There’s a Jamaican macaw (Keegan Michael-Kay) to jailbreak and a risible baddie to overcome. Jason Marin provides grunts for the physically bizarre villain, who’s named only ‘Chef’ during the film.

It’s all woefully familiar stuff. Finding Nemo feels an obvious reference point but there are hints too of Ratatouille and the 20th Century Fox toon Rio. Pixar may not be so reliable these days as the makers of endless stone cold classics but at least they can’t be accused of simply aping the back catalogue. If the clichéd family dynamics weren’t enough, a mini-mobster, predators who may not be so deadly as their reputation, and a faux paradise are all present and correct. All file by in an episodic roll call, without ever gelling together in any sense of narrative flow.
And yet, the film really is beautiful. A two dimensional prologue recalls Renner’s comic book origins, while his artistic leanings ripple through the standard Illumination house style. This is less notable in the birds themselves – all very Secret Life of Pets – than the breathtaking world around them. Highlights include a swooping first flight montage, a haywire descent into Manhattan and any scene in a lushly autumnal Central Park. All the same, when you spend more time admiring the technicalities and backgrounds than the narrative itself, you know something isn’t quite working.
T.S.