Gotta Sing!

‘Sing’, the recent release by the animation company Illumination is a testament to the brilliance of their music team headed up by Music Supervisor Jojo Villanueva. It is not only the fact that clearing the final 65 tracks must have been a marathon, but I can only imagine the number of tracks that got selected and discarded that all had to be checked for availability and cost. If the average commercial considers around 15 for the final edit (and those would have been short-listed from say anything up to 1000), it is not hard to speculate on the sheer volume of work that was undertaken to get the music just on the money for this film!

The process of finding music that not only works with the narrative and tone of a film is a skill in itself, but in ‘Sing’, the additional challenge was to find the right song sung in the right voice to complement the animal character. For me the result is nothing short of genius. Quite rightly Jojo was awarded ‘Outstanding Music supervisor’ at the HMMA Music Awards.

I went to see this with a 5 and 3 year old. They loved it as much as me. The only worrying part was just how quickly kids pick up on the lyrics. The 3 year old locked into ‘Oh my gosh, look at her butt’ for 4 days afterwards. It was only 10 seconds in the whole film but it really demonstrated the power of music and visual when it works.

Treat yourself – a full Oscar winning cast, superb animation that captures every hip shake and arched eyebrow calibrated down to the tiniest cartoon muscle.  Yes, it’s a storyline that is as corny as Simon Cowell and Britain’s Got Talent, but it is the full feel good factor…. Go on, what’s not to love?