Surf’s Up

What exactly is there to say about Surf’s Up? It’s simply a mildly diverting, mildly entertaining, mildly accomplished little movie—something mildly superior to the general run of the “computer-animated movie of the week” that has been flooding theaters for some time now. You may notice that the operative word here is “mild.” This attempt to cash in on the mania for penguins started by March of the Penguins (2005) and carried on by Happy Feet (2006) is perhaps just one little feathered waddler too many.

The story this round concerns Cody Maverick (Shia LeBeouf), a Rockhopper penguin who was just born to surf—despite the fact that no one thinks he can. (The latter part of that being the requisite “believe in yourself” theme that permeates all kid-centric films.) Through sheer tenacity—and the aid of a stoned-out surfing rooster, Chicken Joe (Jon Heder being Jon Heder)—he manages to hook up with a sandpiper talent scout, Mikey (Mario Cantone, TV’s Sex and the City), for a shot at winning the Penguin World Surfing Championship sponsored by the Don King of the animal world, Reggie Belafonte (James Woods), whose exact species eludes me (hedgehog?).

Cody worships the supposedly late great surfer Big Z, who once gave him a Big Z necklace and a “you can be anything you want to be” speech. What he doesn’t know—what only one person … err, penguin, a lifeguard named Lani (Zooey Deschanel), does know—is that Big Z is alive and well, but deliberately shut off from the world and calling himself Geek (Jeff Bridges). There’s also a nasty new-style surfer, Tank Evans (Diedrich Bader), an arrogant winning-is-everything type who appears to have an unwholesome penchant for polishing his trophies. (Make of that what you will.)

The plot is pretty much what you would expect, and it runs in a wholly predictable manner. What sets the film at least a bit apart from so much of the animated kids’ fare we’ve seen of late is the interesting—but not wholly successful—tactic of presenting the story as a documentary, or as a very mild send-up of the surfing documentary with all the “surfing as a metaphor for life” trimmings. This mockumentary approach is nearly inspired, but it keeps getting lost in the movie’s need to tell a story. When the narrative proper kicks in, the whole documentary business gets shunted aside for long stretches, only to resurface as a gag—never mind that chunks of the proceedings are anything but documentary in nature. The result is a movie that keeps losing its identity, but the attack is refreshing all the same.

Also in the film’s favor is the voice acting. According to reports, it was done with the actors actually interacting in the studio (the usual approach is to record the voice tracks separately), and it pays dividends. The standout performance comes from Jeff Bridges, who was obviously meant to be channeling “The Dude” from the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski (1998). While there are inevitable traces of The Dude in Big Z (I was kind of hoping he’d say, “I hate the f***ing Eagles, man”), Bridges actually creates a new, separate character and refuses to simply trade on the earlier creation.

In addition, it’s hard to fault the animation, which is brilliantly done, but it’s at the service of a narrative not quite worthy of it. (The same can be said of the technical side of Shrek the Third, which is the best looking of the three Shrek movies, but harnessed to a lesser work.) Surf’s Up is certainly a clever and inoffensive little movie—one that won’t distress you if you have to take the kids—but it only flirts with being anything more. Rated PG for mild crude humor.