Spry, colorful and unusually styled, the animated movie Surf's Up attempts to extend the recent public surge in affection for penguins, telling the buoyant, reciprocal story of a mentor and pupil who ultimately each show one another sides of life they’ve both been missing out on. Making substantial use of ascendant young star Shia LaBeouf’s personality, the likeable production puts a loose-limbed, mostly agreeable spin on a story with a familiar for-love-of-the-sport moral.

Unfolding, in somewhat unlikely fashion, as a character-focused documentary, the film chronicles headstrong teenage penguin Cody Maverick (LaBeouf), who leaves his Antarctic hometown of Shiverpool to follow his dream of becoming a successful surfer. Befriended along the way by the distractible Chicken Joe (Jon Heder), Cody arrives at Pen Gu Island just in advance of the Big Z Memorial Surf Off, an annual competition named for Cody’s idol.

After meeting cute with lifeguard Lani Aliikai (Zooey Deschanel), Cody immediately faces a setback in his efforts to dethrone the preening, jerky reigning champion, Tank Evans (Diedrich Bader). Cast into exile for a few days, Cody is taken under the wing of a laid-back, hermetic surfer (Jeff Bridges) who becomes his mentor. With this help, Cody learns to balance his desire to win with the pure pleasure of surfing, and the friendships and enjoyment that this affords.

While generally shunning the over-reliance on big sound effects that marks many kids’ flicks, Surf's Up does make certain to include a number of bodily function jokes. It also features a peppy modern soundtrack, driven by toe-tapping alt-rock tunes from acts like Green Day, the Romantics, Incubus and the New Radicals. Still, the movie's mode of expression — a lurking-narrator-style nipped from any number of popular reality TV shows, peppered with canted angles, ironic framing and camera pans, off-screen questions and the occasional broken-glass and wet lens effects — may prove less easily graspable to the PG-rated picture’s chief demographic age range. For the full review, from Screen International, click here.

        

 

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