Another dive into the pre-Talking Movies archives brings up a rather forgotten CGI animation starring the voice of Shia LaBeouf.
Teenage penguin Cody Maverick leaves home for the Big Z Memorial Surf Off in sunny Pen Gu Island where he falls for a pretty lifeguard and meets a mysterious hermit. Will Cody emulate his hero Big Z or will he learn there’s more to life than winning?
Yes, we’re back with bloody anthropomorphic animals again, although mercifully an early gag establishes that these particular penguins neither sing nor tap-dance… Young Cody Maverick (Shia LaBeouf) is eager to escape his preposterously boring life of fish-sorting (hilariously depicted) in Shiverpool, Antarctica. A childhood memory of legendary surfer Big Z sustains his dream of using his surfing prowess to escape to sunnier climes. Documentary film-makers follow his progress as a talent scout for slimy promoter Reggie Belafonte (James Woods) plucks Cody from obscurity to take place in the Surf-off that provides the film’s action climax. The documentary film-makers are of course voiced by directors Brannon and Buck (it’s so post-modern it gives me nosebleeds). Cody is voiced by LaBeouf as a variant of his Transformers persona, but that splendidly awkward turn loses a lot of its humour here as Cody seethes with resentment of his bullying older brother.
The presentation of the film as a rough-cut of an MTV style documentary is quite brilliant. There are many of those trademark editing flourishes and a number of great visual gags like SPEN (Sport Penguin Entertainment Network). This all underscores that there’s a genuine intelligence and wit behind this film that just didn’t quite translate into a great script. The CGI is startlingly good during many of the surfing sequences, helped by the hand-held look (so painstakingly rendered) which makes the peril of a wipe-out painfully suspenseful. But such style cannot disguise the short-comings of the writing. Jeff Bridges, as the reclusive surfing guru Geek who mentors Cody, could have done a hilarious reprise of his role as The Dude from The Big Lebowski, if someone had bothered to write the references. Jon Heder as Chicken Joe, a surfer dude chicken, is likewise saddled with a promising role featuring too few gags. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy star Zooey Deschanel is sadly underused as the love interest, quirky lifeguard Lani, which is an especial pity as she’s one of the very few actresses around with a distinctive enough voice for animated roles.
Ultimately you want to like this film a lot more than it actually deserves. Sure it meanders badly as Cody and Geek do their Luke/Yoda thing while building surfboards and there’s far too little development of the Cody/Lani romance. But it doesn’t have the smugness of the insultingly mediocre Simpsons Movie,and its moral that enjoying yourself is better than winning at all costs (like anti-social jock villain Tank Evans) is quite brilliant; especially given that most CGI animations with A-list voices endlessly promote the message that the most important thing in life is to just be yourself … if you’re pretty.
2/5
Talking Movies 