The Angry Birds Movie (also referred to as onscreen Angry Birds and released in the United Kingdom as such) is a 2016 3D computer-animated Finnish-American comedy film based on the video game series of the same name created by the Finnish IOS and Android game company Rovio Entertainment, but it can also be interpreted to be a prequel to or an origin story behind the original game. The film premiered in Paris on May 5, 2016, and was released in Finland on May 13, 2016, and in the United States on May 20, 2016, in RealD 3D and 4DX. It is the first installment of The Angry Birds Film series.
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 Not so angry, just irritatingly annoying.
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"Some would say that this movie angers me, that this movie agitates me, but more or less I'm just slightly annoyed by these birds. These birds are slightly annoyed, I'm slightly annoyed, and I think collectively we are all slightly annoyed."
— 24 Frames Of Nick
Produced by Columbia Pictures and Rovio Animation (a division of Rovio Entertainment), it was animated by Sony Pictures Imageworks. It was directed by Clay Kaytis and Fergal Reilly in their directorial debuts and written by Jon Vitti. The film stars Jason Sudeikis, Josh Gad, Danny McBride, Maya Rudolph, Kate McKinnon, Sean Penn, Tony Hale, Keegan-Michael Key, Bill Hader, Peter Dinklage, Anthony Padilla, and Ian Hecox. A sequel, The Angry Birds Movie 2 was released on August 13, 2019, with Sony Pictures Animation, which was not involved with this film, co-produced the film, respectively.
Plot
Flightless birds lead a mostly happy existence, except for Red (Jason Sudeikis), who just can't get past the daily annoyances of life. His temperament leads him to anger management class, where he meets fellow misfits Chuck (Josh Gad) and Bomb (Danny McBride). Red becomes even more agitated when his feathered brethren welcome green pigs to their island paradise. As the swine begin to get under his skin, Red joins forces with Chuck and Bomb to investigate the real reason behind their mysterious arrival.
Angry Qualities
- Despite the movie being an origin story, it goes to show throughout the movie that the writers quickly struggled with ideas regarding the plot, since the movie was based on a game with minimal plot. As a result, this makes a lot of plot points feel tacked on with no setup and causes a film to lack a bigger picture for the most part.
- There's even the typical emotional low point before the climax, which has been overdone countless times. Unlike most films with this type of scene, however, this one feels forced considering how idiotic most of the characters are.
- Most of the humor is unfunny, stale, and repetitive, especially once the pigs arrive. A lot of the humor mostly involves things such as butt jokes, crotch jokes, bad bird/pig puns, toiletries, and/or bathroom and fart humor. A few examples include:
- Perhaps the biggest example is an unnecessarily long and disgusting scene where Red, Chuck, and Bomb found out that the Mighty Eagle urinates in a lake that Chuck and Bomb were swimming in and drinking out of. And this scene lasts for over 45 seconds.
- When Red, Chuck, and Bomb were making their way to the Mighty Eagle, Chuck and Bomb create what they imagine to be his battle cry. This caused them to make a variety of obnoxious barn animal noises for over 52 seconds, making this scene in particular extremely annoying.
- There are even inappropriate adult jokes about birth control, stripper pigs, and even one scene where it is implied that Chuck wanted to pull off an orgy. Keep in mind that this is a PG-rated film!
- A lot of the characters are unlikable, annoying, cliched, and idiotic in a bad way. A bunch of them also act nothing like how they are in the games and cartoons.
- While Red is a likable character, his angry and cynical personality is overused, which causes his behavior to get stale rather fast.
- Chuck and Bomb are reduced to very obnoxious idiots, with them imitating the Mighty Eagle's battle cry as mentioned above is a good example.
- The Mighty Eagle went from being a wise and powerful, yet intimidating, to a lazy and arrogant slacker who does nothing important at all until the final battle. However, this can be somewhat justified given that this took place before any of the games.
- Judge Peckinpah is incredibly unlikable jerk. He acts like a biased idiot towards Red in the first half of the movie and never get his comeuppance for being like a clichéd judge, though it’s kind of justified since he has the point that Red's actions of not being careful towards Eva and Edward's egg were wrong. He also might be a racist stereotype like whenever he just defends the pigs or gives them comeuppance.
- Literally none of the other birds aside from Red suspect the pigs are up to no good despite how obvious it is.
- Bubbles' counterpart is a bit contradictory: He barely shows affection for candy and is older than Jay, Jake and Jim, being present before they are born. That said, he is also said to be very wild and reckless there.
- Edward, Eva, and Timothy are huge jerks to Red for much of the film:
- In the first scene of the movie, Edward blames Red for being late for his son Timothy's birthday (which he isn't) and says that it is all his fault, causing Red to snap at him (which is understandable).
- They blame Red for being the first one their new baby boy saw (causing him to think Red's the daddy) even though it wasn't his fault. Furthermore, Timothy was the one who caused this problem (He even gets away with it, which makes him a Karma Houdini).
- Rather unoriginal plot that copies other elements from previous Sony Pictures Animation films. For example: In Surf's Up, there is the famous surfer penguin named "Big Z" who everyone looks up to, but it turns out he became overweight and washed-up, which is exactly what happened to the Mighty Eagle in this movie.
- A plethora of repetitive gags though out the film, such as the very cruel running gag of no one wanting to be hug by the Hug Trader Bird, and another one of the Mime Bird saying "Oh my god...." whenever he gets screen-time.
- It has too many pop-culture references that sometimes feel out of place, especially the Grady Twins from The Shining when Red opens a door in King Pig's castle during the climax.
- The plot has way too many predictable moments, specie mention goes to the climax were the aforementioned Mime Bird is about to be send off, you can easily tell that he's gonna say "OH MY GOD!" as he gets launch off.
- The scene where Red realizes that his suspicions were right when he founds out that the pigs were actually the bad guys the whole time for planting dynamite around the island to steal the birds' eggs and destroy the village is an extremely obvious plot twist, even for viewers who are unfamiliar to the franchise. This was also spoiled by the trailers and posters.
- The final battle between the birds and the pigs is a poorly-done mess. It's far too fast-paced and has far too many things going on at once. There's nothing particularly interesting about the battle either, making it rather forgettable.
- The title is a little bit misleading, as the birds are all happy and cheerful and not angry for most of the film except for Red, and even then he is mostly just irritated than outright angry.
- While the voice acting is great and talented, Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox didn't do a good job of voicing Hal and Bubbles respectively as they sound nothing like in the TV show. Plus, despite having their names being labeled in the main cast, they do not get as much screen time as the other main characters. However, their lack of appearances was made up in an animated short which focuses on them, and it was animated in flash.
- Likewise, despite appearing on a large portion of the film's merchandise, Stella is in the movie for a grand total of 15 minutes, who plays a minor role in the film and is a supporting character at best, making her character wasted and pointless.
- The character designs, despite being expressive, are considered broken base, like the typically limbless birds and pigs suddenly gaining arms and legs for the movie, which divided over whether or not the designs work or if the characters with arms/wings and legs was something man was not meant to see, even if it is serviceable for something like a movie adaptation.
- The scenes with Terence in anger management class with Red can come off as rather creepy and fright-inducing to see, especially with Terence scowling at him.
- Plot hole: Why didn't the birds rebuild Chuck and Bomb's houses at the end of the film (Bomb's shouldn't have even blown up, since it has the structure of a Bomb Shelter that would be immune to himself blowing up), allowing them to stay with Red at his Newly Placed House? Though Chuck and Bomb's houses were rebuilt in the sequel.
Calm Qualities
- The animation is very fluid and detailed, with backgrounds that have great attention to detail, seeing as Bird Island is a major treat for the eyes.
- The character designs are also very expressive, and full of life, even if the addition of limbs made the designs not as faithful to the games.
- Unlike many other movie adaptations of video games, it actually remained faithful to the source material (aside from the birds having wings and feet and not being angry for the most part except Red), and includes plenty of nice references to the games.
- Examples include Red telling Ava's family about three-star ranking, the birds using their special abilities at least during the climax of the movie, and the pigs using vehicles to fight back against the birds, meaning it can be sometimes very enjoyable for fans.
- There is a few funny scenes, such as the scene where Chuck gets a speeding ticket, and the scenes involving Terence, in which he got into anger management, despite being a little dark and disturbing.
- Speaking of Terence, he's more expressive than ever in this movie. He's shown smiling more often, crying, laughing, and even singing in the end.
- There's also a good joke were after Leonard says "That went well...if you're me.", Red says in annoyed-like tone "Dummy.".
- Despite his cynical and angry behavior being overused, Red is surprisingly a likable and relatable character, especially since he's the only character who isn't obnoxious and moronic. Besides, he received a fair amount of character development. He is also nowhere near as angry as he is in the beginning and is now a hero of Bird Island at the end.
- The other characters (such as The Blues) can be likable at times, despite some being underutilized and/or underdeveloped.
- Chuck and Bomb can be likable in some scenes despite being annoying at times.
- The Hatchlings are very cute.
- They even get their own shorts which you can watch online.
- The other characters (such as The Blues) can be likable at times, despite some being underutilized and/or underdeveloped.
- Great and talented voice acting thanks to its all star cast. Bill Hader and Peter Dinklage in particular do fantastic jobs.
- The soundtrack is great such as "Sound of Da Police" by KRS-One and "Rock You Like a Hurricane" by Scorpions.
- The score from Heitor Peiera. An example would be "Red on the Run".
- Though to be fair, some of the pop songs are legit bops, especially Charli XCX's "Explode" and Blake Shelton's "Friends" (the song that plays during the pigs' cowboy show).
- The Mighty Red Song, which is sung by Hatchlings at the end of the movie, is very cute to hear.
- It actually has a good message about fighting back to retake what's yours, most notably when Red encourages the rest of the birds to let their anger loose.
- Despite the plot hole, the ending isn't too bad. In fact, everyone rebuilt the village (after the pigs destroyed it) as well as thanking Red for saving the eggs by building his house in the village, which was a nice moment.
- The movie concept about the origin story for Angry Birds was fairly interesting, but sadly it got executed poorly.
- Contrary to what was stated in AQ#12, the decision of giving the characters limbs was quite smart. For example, in Angry Birds Toons, there were some scenes where the birds and pigs had invisible hands/psychic powers and moved with little hops or even just sliding, but here, said scenes make much more sense thanks to the inclusion of wings/hands and feet.
- The mid-credit scene that reveals that the three blue hatchlings Red saved are actually the Blues from the games is surprising and cool.
- Despite AQ #9, the final battle is still epic and awesome to watch, and you can see that the animators put in a lot of effort into it.
Reception
The Angry Birds Movie received mostly mixed reception who praised the soundtrack, animation, and voice acting, but criticized the story and humor. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 43% based on 159 reviews and an average rating of 4.94/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "The Angry Birds Movie is substantially more entertaining than any film adapted from an app has any right to be—which may or may not be much of an endorsement." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 43 out of 100 based on 27 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.
The sequel, The Angry Birds Movie 2, is widely considered to be an improvement from this film, and reduced a bunch of problems present in this film, although the movie still has inappropriate humor even worse and less faithful to the game than this and underperformed at the box office.
Box office
The Angry Birds Movie was a box office success, grossing over $352 million worldwide and becoming the fourth highest-grossing film of all time to be based on a video game (let alone a mobile device game), behind Warcraft, Detective Pikachu, and Rampage and is also the most successful Finnish-produced film of all time.[1]
Videos
Trivia
- Danny McBride and Bill Hader (the voices of Bomb and Leonard respectively) later starred in Sausage Party, as the voices of Honey Mustard and Firewater, which is also distributed by Columbia Pictures.
- This is the first film not to be produced by Sony Pictures Animation (although the sequel does produce), since The Adventures of Tintin.
- The characters were not depicted in their anthropomorphized cinematic designs until the film's announcement to avoid spoiling the new designs for audiences.
- The first image from the film was revealed in October 2014, with Jason Sudeikis, Josh Gad, Danny McBride, Bill Hader, Maya Rudolph, and Peter Dinklage as part of its cast. Gad at first refused to star in the movie, feeling it was too similar to his role as Olaf in Frozen (as in the 2013 Walt Disney Film) but the director eventually convinced him to sign through a 30-minute "visual pitch".
- Tie-ins with McDonald's, Citroën, Ziploc, Panasonic, and a series of six Lego sets were used to promote the film.
- During the film's marketing campaign, the app icons for most Angry Birds games were changed to depict the cinematic version of Red. A series of free-to-play tie-in games were also produced: Angry Birds Action!, Angry Birds Evolution, and Angry Birds Match.
- After this, almost, if not, all future installments of the Angry Birds franchise use the movie designs for their characters.
- It wasn't until after the release of this movie the franchise was considered to be going downhill by fans, with things like the oversaturation of the generic Angry Birds spinoffs that have nothing to do with what the franchise stood for in the first place, and the removal of almost all the good Angry Birds games in 2019 including the original (during the 10th anniversary of the franchise, and around the time of the release of this movie's sequel to add insult to injury).
References
External Links
The Angry Birds Movie at the Internet Movie Database
The Angry Birds Movie on Rotten Tomatoes
The Angry Birds Movie on Metacritic
The Angry Birds Movie on Letterboxd
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