Sing 2 (2021) Movie Review and Film Summary

Review: Sing 2 is occasionally more entertaining than the first movie, but it rarely competes with some of animation’s recent bests. Hopefully someday they’ll make Kids Bop-adjacent animal movies that are better than this.

Sing 2 Illumination movie — Sing 2 (2021) from Illumination Entertainment

Sing 2 Movie Review

Nowadays, every animated feature gets turned into a series. I don’t make the rules, I just interpret them. Right now, I’m sitting back waiting for The Emoji Movie sequel or the complete origin story to Captain Underpants. One that I couldn’t wait for any longer was the next chapter of a koala named Buster Moon in Sing 2.

Okay, I make jokes. The original Sing is honestly just another movie. It isn’t very cute, it doesn’t hold many laugh out loud jokes, and it relies pretty heavily on the audience doing that Rick Dalton pointing at the screen meme every time a new song turns up. Somehow still, there’s something about it that had me intrigued for the second outing.

The first film is quite messy. It tries to string along six(?) character story arcs that don’t really come together or culminate into a great third act. Many of the powerful, emotional moments don’t quite hit the level they need to for an animated film to climb up my latter of my favorites. And again, the exciting moments don’t feel earned as they’re really just voice actors singing songs I may or may not enjoy the originals of.

The second film at least tries to do something more. It cuts into the surface of trauma and loss and what that could do to someone and the thing they love. At times, it feels authentic. Unfortunately at the end, however, it doesn’t build to anything. It’s a final act full of fun, but for a film more concerned with delivering a concrete message, it falls flat when it just simply can’t.

Sing 2 is slightly better than the first, but we’re living in the golden age of animation. In the last few years, we’ve gotten Toy Story 4, Soul, The Mitchells vs. The Machines, Ron’s Gone Wrong, Encanto, and numerous others. This movie just isn’t coming really close to that tier. It’s a serviceable film, but not a whole lot more than that.