My Experience With… Surf’s Up.

I know that I’ve mentioned that I would be doing a Peanuts series. And I will. I’m just going to do two weeks’ of blogging about CGI’d surfing penguins. Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, and any pets with a stunning ability to read, Surf’s Up.

Now, there was a long stretch I had when I was a youth of going to practically every animated and family film, accompanied by a parent, with both of us getting tickets for the price of a single standard ticket.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it at least

three times here: I love inexpensive

entertainment. It works either way.

If I saw a good film at a low price, I got a great deal! If the film bombed, oh, well, we didn’t even waste $10. In this case… it was average. Slightly above average. It’s a good film.

Since I will be reviewing the sequel to this next week, there will be spoilers.

In a nutshell, there’s a penguin named Cody Maverick, who comes from humble beginnings in Antarctica, where nobody really surfs. His mom is widowed, due to his dad being eaten by a whale while he was fishing. Cody also has a brother who constantly picks on him, as Hollywood thinks older brothers often do.

Cody’s beyond-mundane and lackluster life is changed when a legendary penguin surfer named Big Z...

(You know what, I’m gonna hold

my bad joke for later.)

…makes an appearance at his home land and unintentionally inspires Cody to become a surfer himself. He practices using ice and whatever waves come his way. Years pass, and Cody gets picked up by a recruiter for a massive contest. Along his trip, he meets a way far-out rooster called Chicken Joe. Like Cody, Chicken Joe lost his dad at a young age. Unlike Cody, Chicken Joe’s dad was lost to what I can only assume was Col. Sanders.

As cruel as those untimely demises were,

I found the second one particularly hilarious.

During the tournament, Cody and Joe come up against 9-time champion Tank Evans, who is very skilled, but is a huge bully.

At first, Cody is very clumsy in the tournament, considering he is out of his element. Then one day, Cody comes across an old, washed-up penguin who seems to know a lot about surfing. Yup, it’s Big Z, who was presumed dead after his last match against Tank Evans. It turns out that Big Z chickened out when he realized he was old news and could not keep up with the young talent, so he faked his own death and lived in hiding, with his niece Lani, who was the only one who knew of the secret. Lani and Cody do fall in love, by the way. Kind of a no-brainer there.

When the old penguin is realized to be Big Z, Cody (of course) wants him to be his trainer. Or rather… his coach……. ready for my bad joke?

HE BECOMES HIS “COACH” Z!!!! ^_^

 

Why yes, I do still have my day job.

Why do you ask?

At the finals, it’s Cody, Chicken Joe, and Tank. They duke it out over the waves, with Tank being as big a bully as ever. When he’s after Chicken Joe, Cody disqualifies himself by taking out Tank, making Chicken Joe the champ. Big Z returns to the public eye, and everybody lives pretty much happily ever after.

Right?

You’ll read more on the details next week.

Now, this was just a bare-bones look at the movie, and it does seem rather cut-and-dry. However, one thing I (and my mother, who went with me) really enjoyed about Surf’s Up was the fact that it was well-done in a kind of reality show/documentary footage. This included little interviews with main and side characters, and steadicam was also done nicely… that’s a compliment from me. I can’t STAND unnecessary steadicam. I deliberately never watched The Office because of its constant steadicam. I don’t care how funny Steve Carrell is, there is no reason for every moment of an office building to feel like an intense moment!

I digress.

It was funny. It was cute. It wasn’t the most memorable, especially since I watched Happy Feet not long before that one. Plus, it’s kind of a Robots + Cars plot line, and neither one were bad movies. If you want to spend time watching a half-decent movie and you don’t know what to watch, definitely give this flick a rent from your local library.

Plugging time!

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