Surf's Up
2.5 stars
Voices of Shia LaBeouf, Jeff Bridges, Zooey Deschanel
Directed by Ash Brannon and Chris Buck
Rated PG
Opens Friday
Because movie-goers can’t get enough of cute, cute penguins, apparently, the flightless birds are back onscreen in the animated Surf’s Up, not dancing as they did in Happy Feet, but rather hitting the waves in a benign but often lifeless mockumentary offering familiar “be yourself” platitudes for kids. Like Mumble, the hero of Happy Feet, protagonist Cody Maverick (voiced by LaBeouf) doesn’t fit in with his penguin kin, preferring to surf over gathering fish and tending eggs. Unlike Mumble, though, Cody doesn’t use his eccentricity to better the lives of his fellows; on the contrary, he gets the hell out of the frozen Antarctic wasteland as soon as he can, never to return again (at least over the movie’s brief running time).
Happy Feet and the documentary March of the Penguins were all about building respect for nature and the lives of their animal subjects, but in Surf’s Up the characters might well have just been people. Cody travels to fictional Pen Gu Island for a big surf competition, where he falls for a lifeguard named Lani (Deschanel) and learns totally deep life lessons from his idol, an aging surf champion named Big Z (Bridges, doing a kid-friendly version of the Dude from The Big Lebowski).
It’s breezy and fitfully amusing stuff, and directors Brannon and Buck make at least a token effort to break out of the monolithic computer animation pack with the mockumentary gimmick, although livening up one tired genre by combining it with another is not necessarily a formula for success. Mostly it’s an excuse for them to have characters talk to the camera and show CGI boom mics floating into the frame, and the conceit is abandoned when it’s not convenient (that is, when it’s necessary to show something that roving documentarians never would have caught).
Despite the vocal presence of a couple of genuine surf legends here, anyone interested in the actual sport would be better off renting a documentary like Step Into Liquid or Riding Giants, which offer real glimpses into what CGI can re-create but never truly capture. They don’t have any annoying penguins, either.