Not all birds migrate. Heck, not even all birds within the same species migrate. Migration is between you and you bird God. Here’s a fun fact – the shortest migration may be attributed to the North American Blue Grouse, which migrates from pine forest to deciduous woodlands, a distance of roughly 300 meters. Congratulations, couch potato migrators, you have done the bare minimum to qualify as a migrating species. Now quit your grousing.
Today’s film is Migration, a cautionary animated tale about why you shouldn’t do it. Er, I mean, why you should migrate. I think that was the point, but you’d never know by the plot.
Mack (voice of Kumail Nanjiani) is an adult male mallard, but I think he’s part chicken. He has his pond. He likes his pond. He doesn’t want to leave his pond for fear of everything. He explains his parenting: “I’m teaching [the kids] very valuable fears.” Accompanying the stodgy recalcitrance of Mack the strife are his wife and two children, all of whom want to fly south when confronted with a flock of migrating waterfowl headed for Jamaica.
Pleading doesn’t push mallard Mack, but what does is his distaste for Uncle Dan (Danny DeVito). Upon realization that staying in the pond means a winter full of Uncle Dan, Mack decides, “Sure, Jamaica, why not?”
Sand Uncle Dan comes anyway. Quite the coup, ducks.
Their fowl state of affairs gets worse, pretty much, immediately. When you’re Mack, everything is a predator, except for NYC pigeons, whom he picks a fight with anyway. God forbid, a genuine predator shows up.
Oh, one does, in human form. And that’s your film. Escape the predator, find Jamaica, where, of course, the locals have no taste for duck whatsoever. This is one of those c
omedies in which prudence is treated as cowardice and the kids have to save the day through pluck and daring. I cannot deny your duck-identifying child will see the positives here.
This could have been a bigger film, one in which the fears of Americans are all presented front-and-center. It could have been glorious; fear is the only reason anybody votes Republican and yet millions do anyway. At presentation, however, Migration becomes a smaller film, with trivial challenges, underwhelming expectations, and small moments. The diversity fan in me wholly applauds the one-footed pigeon leader, Chump (Awkwafina), and if this character were given anything to do besides take offense at being called by their chosen name, there might be something there.
Years ago, Magellanic penguins were introduced to the existing penguin population at the San Francisco Zoo. Being Magellanic, the birds naturally took to long swims which existed only in the form of transversing the moat that surrounded penguin island. Pretty soon, the Magellanic species convinced the other aquatic birds that Migration was what all the cool kids were doin’ and everybody joined in. 6,000 miles of circuits around Penguin Island later, the non-Magellanic species were dehydrated, thin, and very tired. The zookeepers had to erect a wall to keep the one species from killing off all the others by attrition. That story was mildly more entertaining than Migration. As children’s films go, Migration isn’t awful or annoying, so if your kids latch onto it, you sigh and say, “ok.” But after one-and-one-half viewings maximum, you’re not going to be watching it with them again.
There once was a mallard named Mack
Constantly glancing behind his own back
The bird was a clown
Yet learned to get down
By departing his mental cul-de-sac
Rated PG, 83 Minutes
Director: Benjamin Renner, Guylo Homsy
Writer: Mike White, Benjamin Renner
Genre: Films that flew south for the winter
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Your avian loving child?
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Hunters
