Seth MouseFarlane: The Worst Character

Sing (2016) is a movie that exists.

I distinctly remember thinking when I first saw promotional material for it “Great, Illumination is doing a Zootopia cash-in” and being ready to dismiss it.

And then they put out the trailer that had a cover of Dream On by Aerosmith and that meant I was obligated to go see it.

It was fine. Even if they didn’t actually play Dream On in the movie.

I don’t think that saying Sing is a Zootopia cash-in is entirely enough to describe the situation, though. Sing is very clearly trying to do its own thing, and it mostly succeeds at what it wants to do. Jukebox musicals have been popular and audiences like having underdog characters to root for, there doesn’t need to be anything especially complicated. All I’m saying is that I wouldn’t be surprised if someone at Illumination had been kicking around the idea for a movie about a singing competition for a while and then news of Zootopia broke out and they decided to have the characters be animals. It is a movie which is very up-front about what it is.

I have wanted to make a ramble about Sing for a while to sort out my mixed feelings about the movie. It was going to be a list of the various points for and against it, full Jenny Nicholson-style. Unfortunately, partway through my computer crashed and I lost all my progress because notepad doesn’t have autosave, and in the time since then I haven’t been particularly motivated to try rewriting it all. It’s only now that I’m getting some inspiration to try this from a slightly different angle.

So, to stretch out this preamble a little longer, a rough summary:

I Can’t Hate Sing Even Though I Probably Should: Abridged Version

I generally like Sing. I find it to be a pleasant, reasonably entertaining, occasionally emotional experience from beginning to end. I like the vast majority of the characters, they are funny and relatable and have clear arcs. I like Rosita and Johnny and Ash and Meena and I want them to succeed. I even want Buster to succeed at his big theater con job despite him being an unrepentant asshole. I appreciate that there isn’t an overabundance of exceedingly obnoxious content, Gunter easily could have been awful but he had a great chemistry going with Rosita. I think they had pretty good designs for all the animals of this setting and a varied cast (even if almost all of the main cast consisted of mammals by the end). I particularly liked Meena’s design, I love how she keeps her big elephant ears folded around her head and they steadily open up when she starts singing. I genuinely tear up a little at moments like Ash breaking down during her recital or when Meena finally starts singing at the end. Oh, and Nana Noodleman is prime gmilf material. I always have a good time when I watch this movie.

I say all this as primer for the fact that I really ought to hate everything this movie represents in terms of the erosion of modern mainstream media. In enjoying this movie I am playing directly into the hands of corporate-mandated lazy mass-market appeal, just like everyone who liked Minions or The Lorax or inevitably the upcoming Super Mario Bros. movie. For as much as I liked (most of) these characters, I really struggle to think of much to say about them beyond one or two basic personality traits and how determined they are to achieve their goals. A single one of these characters' arcs could have been enough to base a movie around, but instead they decided to cram all of them into one movie and they all got the bare minimum amount of development they needed. The conflict is paper-thin and basically evaporates into nothing when the Moon Theater gets destroyed during the second act. The movie goes as far as it can to not put any character over the others, essentially making the singing competition doomed from the word go, because only having one winner would mean letting all the others down. The backstory is extremely tell-don’t-show to avoid drawing attention to the fact that Buster seems to be a really shit theater manager and maybe doesn’t actually know much of anything about theater, and by the end of the movie it doesn’t seem like he’s actually had to learn much of anything. Everything that could possibly be done to shave this product down to the most barebones feel-good experience it could be has been done.

Except for one creative decision which I just don’t understand at all.

And that brings us, at long last, to Mike.

As with everything else about this movie, the viewer is told everything they need to know about Mike in his very first scene. Mike the mouse, voiced by Seth MacFarlane, is seen during the pan across the city, playing a saxophone on the street and wearing what appears to be a rather expensive tuxedo that I’d expect to be out of the budget of a street performer. A passer-by drops him some cash, which prompts him to go ballistic on them and insist that they’re holding out on him, proceeding to berate them and then steal right from their wallet while they collapse from an asthma attack. You know, a real pleasant person that we definitely don’t want to see get eaten by a bear.

Mike is an utter anomaly in this movie, and he is quite possibly the worst character that a piece of fiction has ever tried to get me to view sympathetically.

I could go on and on about the things that I hate about Mike. I hate his smug arrogance and how he pushes aside everyone around him. I hate his conspicuous out-of-place accent. I hate how he gets to hook up with Tara Strong. I hate his constant shit-eating grin. I hate the grody mid-orgasm O-face he has literally every time he’s singing, no seriously he looks like he’s creaming his pants whenever he’s got a microphone.

But it doesn’t really matter how bad Mike is as a person. The real problem is how bad Mike is as a character, as a plot element. Because, by all accounts, Mike really doesn’t belong in this story. Mike, in fact, actively undermines this story.

Let’s review all the other contestant characters and their respective motivations. Rosita wants to break out from her grueling housewife existence and show the world she can sing. Johnny wants to get out from his father’s shadow and show the world he can sing. Ash wants to show the world she can sing no matter what her shitty boyfriend tells her. Meena wants to go through a Fluttershy episode plot— I mean show the world she can sing. Even Gunter just really wants to have the opportunity to perform. Buster’s advice to all of them is “Just sing”, just sing your heart out, keep moving forward, don’t let yourself get held back. These are characters who have something to prove and they put their all into it.

Mike doesn’t have anything to prove. Mike doesn’t really have any passion for singing, ultimately, for him it’s just a means to an end. He’s a street performer, he does this every day. This is all just about the money for him. He doesn’t even bother with practice most of the time because he’s certain that he’s guaranteed to win the competition, and he drops out from the new show as soon as it becomes apparent there’s no prize on the table. Mike only comes back in the end because some rando on the street challenged his manhood. And probably because he wanted to get off in front of a live audience.

But what I really don’t understand is what logic went into the decision that a character like this was necessary to include in the first place. Given what I’ve said above about how low-stakes the conflict is and how few “unlikeable” characters there are among the theater cast, why would they put in a character like Mike who is so blatantly and unrepentantly awful? Were they really just that desperate for another big celebrity name to tack onto the trailers so they begged Seth MacFarlane to voice a character? Did they really want to pander to Frank Sinatra fans? Did they think it would be enough to turn around opinions on him by having a single moment in which he is awed by Meena’s performance at the end before fucking out of the movie? They must have, considering they went out of their way to redeem all of the other characters who didn’t appreciate the main cast enough, Rosita’s husband and Johnny’s dad and even Ash’s shitty boyfriend.

I feel like Mike is only there out of necessity. They needed some contrived way to bring conflict into the movie because the competition was so limp to begin with, so they had someone who could piss off some random mobsters and cause a big crisis to start off the third act. And then after that he’s basically gone. After his song in the show, he just drives off with his girlfriend and one of the bears clinging onto his car, with no conclusion as to what ultimately happens. He doesn’t even appear in the group photo for the new theater’s opening in the final shot of the movie.

Also Mike is way too much of a privileged straight white male in what is otherwise a cast that entirely consists of disenfranchised women and queer men.

There are plenty of ways Mike could have worked. Maybe he could have been more invested in the performance, and because he’s experienced with doing shows it would quickly become apparent to him how much of a sham Buster is. Maybe despite his greed and arrogance, he still gets pulled into the competition because he sees that there’s some genuine talent on display. Maybe he could have had his relationship with one of the other characters fleshed out more, probably Meena, something that would make his reaction at the end more meaningful.

But we’ll never know what more could have been done with Mike, because Sing 2 is on the horizon and Seth MacFarlane is conspicuously missing from the cast. It seems at the moment like most of the characters are just facing rehashes of their arcs from the first movie, and the lion voiced by Bono is a world-weary past-his-prime musician who Mike also probably would have fit better as than as a smug asshat. I guess he really did get eaten by the bear in the end after all. And nothing of value was lost.

So, in conclusion:

I was here first, you can’t take Nana from me, I have dibs on the hot wolf.