Streaming review: 'Sing: Thriller'

If there's one furry series I should be completely behind, but have always been a bit down on, it's Illumination's Sing franchise. The series is set in a completely furry world, with a complete lack of humans – something I can always get behind. And yet, I can't ever quite get behind them.

I think if I had to put my finger on what's wrong, it's that the Sing movies feel like the Illumination version of Oscar bait, being behind the scenes musicals that ostensibly celebrate the performing arts, something Academy Awards voters should, in theory, love; and yet, they can't even get the easy lay up of Best Original Song, which is straightforwardly embarrassing for movies called, well, Sing. It's not that they're failed Oscar Bait, it's that they're not going for Best Picture, or even Best Animated Feature, but simply seem to be aiming to be nominated in that category. They're not aiming for the top, and they're still missing!

Or maybe I'm just being too hard on them, and displacing my own Oscar obsessions on this otherwise innocuous series of jukebox musicals with no higher goal than to be entertaining bits of fluff. The newest entry in the franchise, if it can be called that, is just that. Sing: Thriller is a short available on Netflix, and it features a simple take on a nightmare zombie apocalypse, but furry and kid-friendly; an obvious homage to Michael Jackson's Thriller. It's definitely for kids, with a rating of TV-Y, for "fear", which I think would only apply to the absolute youngest viewers.

What bumps (and jives) in the night

The short opens with an audience entering the theater owned by Buster Moon (a koala voiced by Matthew McConaughey) for a Halloween-themed production, featuring Ash the porcupine (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) as a mad scientist who turns her victims into fruits and vegetables. I guess she's the furry world version of Dr. Moreau? Okay, that's almost clever, and I'm glad the gang has abandoned their world's version of Las Vegas and taken my favorite character from last movie's original advice and just gone back to their roots and create good, wholesome family entertainment (with maybe, like, a little "fear"). After the show, the cast and crew head out to a Halloween party, and encounter some sort of weird goop that has leaked from a nearby lab accident. You can probably figure out the rest from here. Don't spoil it for the actual kids in the audience, though.

Sing: Thriller does get a lot of the voice cast from the original Sing back, in addition to McConaughey and Johansson. You've got Tori Kelley as Meena the elephant, Taron Egerton as Johnny the gorilla and Nick Kroll as Gunter the pig returning. The entire new voice cast of Sing 2 is absent, though pretty much every important character from the both movies appear, either as audience members of the play in the first half, or as dancing and singing pseudo-zombies in the second. This does include the Seth MacFarlane-voiced Mike the mouse, which would seem to confirm he was not brutally murdered by a bear at the end of the first movie. However, since he never says anything, nobody interacts with him, and this is a Halloween special, I say this is obviously his ghost haunting the theater. Finally, Garth Jennings returns as director and writer, as well as voicing the lizard Miss Crawly.

This is much like Disney's Zootopia+; fun, but hardly necessary viewing. If you liked the Sing movies, have a Netflix subscription and about a quarter hour of free time, it's worth checking out. Note that I originally meant to make this a double feature review with another Netflix Halloween furry movie spinoff short, The Bad Guys: Haunted Heist, but it isn't available on my $6.99 a month, ad-based subscription – and it's probably on the same level, so I decided Sing: Thriller was all the TV-Y "fear" I could take for the time being.