Surf’s up finally made it to Australian Cinema’s the other week. I don’t think it did too well. Within 1 or 2 weeks it was slapped into the early day viewing category. I got around to see it on Saturday with about 15 extremely excited kids and their fathers, who were hoping to score a 90 minute break from needing to look after them themselves. I hear ya. Well I don’t, but if i had kids, I reckon I would.

First thing, this movie and Happy Feet never need to be in the same sentence together. Two completely different films that, except for the odd penguin, bear no resemblance to each other.

Anyway, the Movie. It’s the first animated mockumentary feature film. The documentary style of shooting worked really well. They obviously took some creative license to allow shots that really couldn’t have been taken from a documentary film making team, but hey, I don’t think the target audience would really care. Oh, and there’s some great interaction between the characters and the camera man.

Characters and Script
I’ll be careful not to let out too much info on the plot here. So, there wont be any spoilers..
The characters are what really make this movie. The big Penguin that Codie meets when he gets to the island is the stand-out character without a doubt. He’s voiced by Jeff Bridges.
Cody is who the docco is set around. He is your typical “cocky kid with talent” character we’ve seen 23.6 million times before. Now, there are one or two stand out scenes with these two guys interacting, and it’s magic.

This is a mockumentary in the same style of This is Spinal Tap. I know that with this style of film, they do a lot of filming of the actors just hanging out in character, and just use the good stuff. I read this interview with Jeff Bridges and he says he and Shia LeBeouf(Cody) improvised a lot of the dialogue themselves in the studio. Apparently the director encouraged this. Good choice.

Other characters of note are Joe, the chicken. He’s a stoner surfie chicken kinda resembling Crush the turtle from Nemo. Except he’s a chicken. He’s actually quite likable. He had enough of something to make him stand out from the stoner character crowd. Oh, and every time I saw that chicken walk, I giggled. I do tend to giggle excessively at odd things, but that chicken walk is just hilarious… He actually walks like a chicken
Other shots of note are Cody’s family interviews. Great job here.

The CG was Amazing, the waves were just ridiculous. Wow.
Animation was great. I think, because the dialogue is kinda real life, i don’t think there was much opportunity to really push the acting. So, in the end, you don’t come out of the film thinking about how great the animation was. But hey, the animation is fantastic in this. Not a pixar filim though.

Overall, it was quite good. I do have a gripe though
1. We didn’t really get to watch the surfing in the comps. I mean it was there, but it was kinda like watching a fight scene in the Bourne Identity movies. You really wanted to be able to see more of what was going on. There was the odd slow motion replay that was pretty cool.

Did I mention that Kelly Slater and Rob Machado make appearances? Sweet.

So i gave this a good 7.5 out of 10.
It’s probably fair to mention that I surf, and I’m an animator, so I may be biased towards this film’s subject matter.
If you were having any doubts about seeing this film, don’t.
Go watch it.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 11:58 am and is filed under Film Making. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.