Sing

Garth Jennings’s Sing is less a musical than a licensing operation with animation attached. Jennings picked the tracks himself while other people chased the clearances. His own account is that he would ask for Golden Slumbers by the Beatles with Jennifer Hudson singing it, and the rest was an enormous task. At least eighty percent of the songs were locked before animation began, which means sequences were built to fit tracks already chosen rather than the other way round. Publicity promised more than eighty five songs. The finished film carries sixty four, the gap lost to creative decisions and rights problems. That density shapes the viewing directly: most of the songs pass as fragments a few seconds long, and a complete performance only arrives in the finale. Taron Egerton won his part by auditioning a cappella. The contest is a pretext and the real subject is the nerve it takes to walk on stage. Jennings also voices Buster’s elderly iguana assistant with the glass eye. A good fit if a rapid parade of half remembered chart songs sounds like a recognition game rather than a distraction. Not a fit if you want characters to sing numbers all the way through and carry the plot with them, because here the music mostly arrives and leaves before it can.