The Angry Birds Movie (2016)

The Angry Birds Movie arrives as a Finnish-financed adaptation of a mobile game about slingshotting poultry, and it carries its cultural burdens lightly, which is to say it carries almost none. A red bird with a temper is sentenced to an anger management class, where he meets a hyperactive speedster and a black bird who detonates without warning. The film treats these conditions as comic machinery, which is the closest it comes to any modern social awareness. Red's rage, Chuck's inability to slow down, Bomb's intermittent explosive disorder: these are the film's engine, not its thesis. We are invited to laugh at them, and the laughter is affectionate, so the picture earns a modest nod for neurodivergent coding without ever pursuing the thought further.

The voice cast is stocked with performers of color in supporting roles, and the film makes no comment on the fact, which is a point in its favor and also a point against any claim of purposeful representation. The characters are birds. One of them is a pig. There is no gender argument here, no romance worth the name, no climate anxiety, no indictment of the wealthy pigs who arrive bearing consumer goods and a giant slingshot. The pigs do bring stuff. That is not a critique of capital. It is a plot device.

What remains is a brisk, brightly colored children's comedy about suspicion and eggs, one that opened at number one and sold a great many tickets and toys. It lectures no one. It represents little on purpose. It simply exists, competently, and that may be the most honest thing about it. The sequel arrived three years later, as sequels do, and the world was not improved or diminished either way. We file it accordingly, under animated, agreeable, and ideologically inert.

WATCHED: An island of flightless birds, a suspicious red outcast, and a marketing budget that could fund a small nation's cinema. None of it asks anything of us. That is either a failure or a mercy, and after a long week of sermonizing cartoons, I am inclined toward the latter. The pigs get a walled city. The birds get anger. Everyone gets a lesson in trust, delivered at a volume suitable for children. No further instruction is required, and none is offered. A tidy, weightless confection, scored and shelved, its conscience entirely clear because it never formed one to begin with. The eggs are recovered. The credits roll. We move on to the next vintage.

For the record: the film does contain a scene in which a character weeps, and another in which a large eagle is mocked for his weight, both played for laughs, neither meant as commentary. The sommelier's note reads: light body, no finish, faint notes of merchandising. Pairs well with a nap.