We have seen them marching across the Artic wilderness and tap dancing on ice, but now they are moving to a warmer climate so they can show off their surfing chops – I’m just waiting for a mafia penguin movie. But “”Surf’s Up”” is not really a penguin movie – it’s more a surfing movie with penguins. Rather than doing “”Blue Crush,”” filmmakers implemented the popular animal to tell a very human story. Basically, the penguins are just a gimmick to attract shrieking nose-picking children whose attention spans could not even fully appreciate the contest documentary parody, making the theater full of rugrats so antsy it was almost unbearable.
The animated mockumentary has some very strong features, one of which is the amazing computer graphics that succeed in the impossible task of making something as complex as the ocean and its waves so incredibly detailed that until you see a tuxedo with wings on the surfboard, you forget you’re watching a cartoon – a definite one-up of the synthetic, pixelated image of Kate Bosworth riding a tube. The remarkable images are paired with a remarkable voice cast, featuring pro-surfers Kelly Slater and Rob Machado as themselves (if they were penguins), Jeff Bridges (“”The Big Lebowski””), Mario Cantone (“”Sex and the City””), Zooey Deschanel (“”The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy””) and perhaps the best use of Jon Heder since “”Napoleon Dynamite”” (only as a chicken who has boiled his brain one too many times can Heder really shine). Diedrich Bader, another “”Napoleon Dynamite”” wonder, creates the perfect villain, proving to be as comedic as he is despicable when he shows off his trophies in a scene that can only be described as borderline soft-core porn, yet another that is lost on kids.
It has also been a big year for former Disney bitch Shia LaBoeuf (“”Disturbia,”” “”Holes””), who is due to come out in this summer’s “”Transformers”” and has traversed film genres to lend the relaxed wit and effortless dialogue of his voice to Cody Maverick, a 17-year-old penguin who longs to escape the chilly hold of the Arctic town of Shiverpool, declaring, “”This place sucks.”” As he is shadowed and interviewed by a reality film crew, Cody shows us his personal, albeit completely ridiculous, drive to be a pro surfer, while we also learn about the preposterous invented history and culture of surfing penguins (apparently, they invented the sport). Because Cody’s goals are not typical of a normal male penguin from his town – we learn that the males must hatch their offspring and believe “”It takes a real man to sit on an egg”” – he is ostracized by his family because he is constantly shirking his responsibilities in order to surf, which pays off when he is discovered by a talent scout who brings him to a surfing competition on Pen Gu Island purely because of his determination, a great lesson for kids if they have managed to make it this far. Set to a played-out surfer soundtrack complete with tracks from the ’90s by Incubus, New Radicals and Green Day, “”Surf’s Up”” is plenty clever, but is essentially a bunch of penguins looking at this summer’s massive lineup and thinking “”I wanna play.””
