Third time's the charm with the penguins. Who'd have thought? The premise of this digitally animated flick is high-concept enough — it's supposedly a documentary about penguins hanging six, as it were, in the Penguin World Surfing Competition in Hawaii — to make you wonder just how high the conceptualizers were when they thunk it up.
But the film turns out to be a laid-back delight; complete with the animated equivalent of hand-held cameras, boom mikes accidentally descending into the frame, and a loose mockumentary format much like the one Christopher Guest developed for Waiting for Guffman, it's got as much to offer adults as kids. And when glacier-kid Cody Maverick (voice of Shia LaBeouf) gets taken under the wing of surfing legend Big Z (voice: Jeff Bridges), the improvised, ad-libby ethos gets pretty giddy. It helps that computer animation can take you where cameras can't — alongside two surfers inside the curl of a perfect wave at sunset — as easily as it can to the ocean floor with a wipe-out. And the picture's message, which is basically that winning's not as important as having fun, will sit well with any parent who's ever had to console a car full of Little Leaguers after a heartbreaker.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
