Do you ever wish you could up and fly away, over the horizon, to new lands, uncharted oceans, untamed wilderness? Different people? Different climates? A different you? “Into the great wide open,” etc. and so on.
The days go by and you wish you were a different guy
Different friends and a new set of clothes
You make alterations and affect a new pose
A new house a new car a new job a new nose
Of course you do. We all do. There is no frontier. There is nowhere to go where you can escape The Eye. The world has shrunk. And worst of all, most insultingly, it’s really, really stupid. Painfully stupid. Hurt-your-hair stupid. Modernity is the dumbest of all possible worlds, run by evil clowns who are as moronic as they are venal. Calling them “bugmen” is insulting to bugs, who after all are only carrying out the purposes imbued within them by God Almighty. What’s our excuse?
Now, imagine you are a bird. I like birds. Being cooped up, working from home for the past four years, I’ve developed a fondness for our feathered friends, (allegedly) descended from dinosaurs and now free to take fight wherever the spirit takes them. Like the humble insect, the noble bird too fulfills God’s purpose. Indeed, the Lord takes care of the birds of the air. What makes us think He won’t similarly take care of us?
The bird represents freedom. Where he makes his nest is home. I have two budgies I am sick of caring for. A part of it is the, albeit minor, inconvenience of feeding them, changing the cage, and so on. Another is that it feels cruel to keep an animal that can fly in a cage. I’d let them go but, you know, it’s a New England winter and budgies are native to Australia.
One of our original birds did escape two summers ago. Although it was the coolest one who actually enjoyed being held, once he saw the opportunity for freedom, voom, he was gone. I like to think the little yellow bugger survived. He deserves it.
But it's superficial and it's only skin deep
Cause the voices in your head keep shouting in your sleep
Get back, get back
I took the kids to see Migration recently, the latest offering from Illumination, the studio that produced, among others, the Despicable Me and Minion films, and a little flick you might have heard of about a pair of Brooklynite ethnic stereotype brothers fighting a fire-breathing and very thirsty dinosaur in a land of giant mushrooms and even bigger apes.
Illumination generally makes good stuff. Fun for the whole family. Generally cruder than peak Disney or Pixar, not as refined, but nowhere near as crass as stuff from DreamWorks—while there may be the gag only the parents will get in an Illumination movie, they tend to avoid the reference-a-minute “Remember this?” Family Guy style of humor of, say, the Shrek series.1 No sucker-punches, nothing anti-family or anti-God. Very pro-family, in fact,2 including Migration. We’ll get to that.
Migration was written by Mike White, a gentleman most familiar to me for playing hapless Ned Schneebly in School of Rock, a movie Mr. White also wrote. It turns out Mike White has written a lot of really successful and well-received films and TV shows, but some not-so-successful and well-received films and TV shows as well. For every White Lotus, there is a The Emoji Movie. Into every life some rain must fall. White’s dad was apparently a conservative Christian who wrote speeches and ghostwrote for holy rillers such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. His dad later came out as gay. Mike is bisexual, and lives with a man. The director and co-developer of the story is Benjamin Renner, a man most know to me for being French.
Never let it be said Hollywood doesn’t have talented people. Or gays. Or Frenchmen.
In a New England pond (I can relate!) resides a family of four ducks. We begin with the father, Mack (Kumail Nanjiani) telling his son Dax (Caspar Jennings) and daughter Gwen (Tresi Gazal) a bedtime story about all the nasty predators out there. Mack’s wife Pam (Elizabeth Banks) interjects to keep the kids from freaking out before bed. There is some typical “wife eye-rolls/physically assaults obnoxious husband” “humor” here—she’s the level-headed one, of course, and he’s the worry-wart—but it quickly passes. There are only trace amounts of girl-bossing in this movie.
Mack is obviously worried about the great wide open for some reason . . . but we never learn what it is. Where his parents killed by predators? We never see his parents. His Uncle Dan (Danny DeVito) is in the picture, but no mom and dad. Later, we see Mack act very brave and daring, to his kids’ astonishment. What happened to make Mack such a mewling, mawkish mallard? We never find out. Too bad. Even in a children’s movie like this, a little character development goes a long way. Pam is worried that Mack’s over-abundance of caution is holding the kids back, and she is obviously wistful for adventure, if it feels like there’s some missing context. Perhaps we’ll see it in the extended director’s cut?3 Suffice it to say, Migration is like a less-poignant Finding Nemo.
Anyway, a family of majestic blue ducks touches down at the pond to rest on their way to Jamaica. Dax becomes smitten by one family’s cute daughter Kim (Isabel Merced). The family invites them to join in the trip. Mack, of course, refuses, until a night encounter with Uncle Dan, a duck who has definitely seen better days, makes Mack resolve not to become a lonely old mallard.
So Mack has a change of heart. He wakes the family up early to go fly. Gwen insists Uncle Dan come along, over Mack’s protests, which is a nice touch. You get a glimpse into the bond Uncle Dan has with the children throughout Migration. He loves the kids and is good to them, and they love him. It’s cute. We never learn why Mack isn’t the biggest Uncle Dan fan. Because Dan reminds Mack of his own potential future? We may never know.
Maybe he reminds Mack he needs to get back. That trying to change, to overcome his own personal limitations, is dumb, a fool’s errand. Who is he to challenge the world? To have an adventure to take a chance? Who are any of us, indeed.
Standing in the middle of nowhere
Wondering how to begin
Lost between tomorrow and yesterday
Between now and then
And now we're back where we started
Here we go round again
Day after day I get up and I say
I better do it again
Only those who refuse to listen to the man in the mirror telling them “No” will ever achieve anything of value in life. This goes for people as well as ducks. Art imitating life. Quick quack, y’all.
Danny DeVito does a good job with the material. You get a feeling he could do roles like this in his sleep, but his performance never sounds phoned in.
Kumail Nanjiani also does a fine job with a very duck-like performance. I don’t know how to describe it. Maybe he has a future in animation. While a fine actor from what I’ve seen, and particularly adept at comedy, Nanjiani is a physically unattractive man. Not pleasant to look at. It doesn’t matter how jacked he gets (he’s quite jacked).
So off the family goes to Jamaica. Of course, little place called New York City gets in the way. It’s tricky to fly through, and they get lost. Uncle Dan tries to eat a discarded sub (or hoagie, or grinder, depending on your zip code) before a flock of pigeons tries to steal it. The rest of the family comes to Uncle Dan’s aid, leading Mack to call them “Vermin.” This really gets them mad, and causes the pigeon’s leader, a bug-eyed little thing named Chump (Awkwafina)4 to get all up in Mack’s grill. Mack, of course, is terrified at having offended Chump. It’s a sequence I feared was going to be a racial allegory—remember “Central Park Karen” who the media decided everyone in America had to hate because white woman?—but it wasn’t. They all become friends after Pam (of course) diffused the situation and stands up to Chump, bargaining on how to split the sandwich (to be fair, Uncle Dan did find it first). Anyway, the family is lost and Chump agrees to help them.
Chump’s friend Delroy (Keegan-Michael Key) is a scarlet macaw from Jamaica, kept as a pet by some crazy unnamed Chinese-looking, knife-wielding chef who runs what looks to be a very successful restaurant. Delroy tells them the way, but his sadness at being caged—how cruel!—touches Dax who vows to find the key. Mack tells him no . . . and ventures to the kitchen himself. Pam soon follows and the two succeed in saving the poor Jamaican bird.
It’s a fun sequence. Not as scary as an earlier horror movie spoof featuring a few herons, but more humorously intense. With Delroy leading them, the mallards have more misadventure, but the crazy chef hasn’t forgotten what Mack and family did to him . . .
You know, the chef and some other human characters5 aren’t objectively evil. They’re doing their job: eating animals. That’s what humans do. Only in a world where animals are anthropomorphic, are ensouled to the equivalent degree of humans, is nature seen as wrong. Evil. Animals eat each other and always have. Are we not taught that humans are just another animal? It’s the cycle of life, man. Life feeds on life. Don’t go full Morrissey on me here.
The chef is only evil in the context of this film.
Anyway, the theme of Migration is to not be afraid of change and not let fear and anxiety keep you from fulfilling your destiny . . . or at least experiencing the world. A nice theme, if not a particularly original one. Migration takes few chances, but that’s not a bad thing for a kid’s movie. The animation is gorgeous, the voice acting generally fine, and the jokes hit that sweet spot between “too obvious” and “inappropriate.” The pigeon gets hit by a bus! You could knock it for being “sitcom level,” but since when is it a crime to make a movie the whole family can enjoy without reservation?
Politically or spiritually, there is nothing objectionable here. Not one iota. It’s odd to have to say “There’s no causal satanism in a children’s film,” but these are the times in which we live. Migration also positively portrays heterosexual marriage and family, and doesn’t play the “Men are dumb cowards” card. Imagine that! It’s not a particularly deep movie, or a particularly adventurous one, but that’s okay. Sometimes you want 90 minutes of inoffensive, joyful fun. Remember fun?
Migration is certainly worth taking the kids to. I respect Illumination for making a one-off and not yet another Despicable Me/Minions movie, at least not yet. That’ll come, I’m sure.
And you think today is going to be better
Change the world and do it again
Give it all up and start all over
You say you will but you don't know when
Remember: you are holding yourself back. We might not be birds, we might not have that glorious freedom of flight, but we can still spread our metaphorical wings if we only refuse to listen to our worst critic: ourself.
Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?
Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?
Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
— Matthew 6:25-27
In conclusion, Migration is a movie about birds, and I like birds because birds get me thinking. Whether or not birds are even real is a story for another post.
- Alexander
Help fuel my writing habit by fueling my caffeine habit and buy me a coffee.
The Kung-Fu Panda movies are actually pretty good.
One of the key points of the Despicable Me movies is how much the supposedly despicable Gru loves the three kids from the first movie so much that he adopts them and bacons a good man. Brings a tear to this cynic’s eye.
This is isn’t—there isn’t one. I’m saying this for the benefit of the guy who thought I thought The Blues Brothers was a serious movie.
What a name . . .
None of whom speak in this movie.
I saw a trailer for it when I last took my kid to the movies, it looked good. I didn't realize it was a Mike White movie, I like White Lotus a lot.
A lack of casual devil worship shouldn’t be a ringing endorsement, but it actually does tell me that I’d probably enjoy the movie. Has the bar really sunk so low?