Firstly, I will say that I have never read the book so I will not have the bias that a lot of people who read the book first do. So I will be reviewing this straight as a movie.
One of the biggest issues I had with this film is the romance though. It was incredibly forced.
So, in a movie that did this better, Pebble and the Penguin (yes, I am using that movie as a positive comparison. god help me) The main girl KNEW the main guy for a long time. They had known each other since they were little and fell in love over time Trumpet and the swan on the other hand doesn't feel things like getting to know each other is very important.
Louie meets the girl one time as a kid, and then runs away. He meets her again and they go diving for a short while.
Then he literally runs away for MONTHS as he goes to learn how to read and write. Yes. This trumpeter swan goes off to a school to learn to read and write. And...for some reason this doesn't qualify as international news with the entire world staring in awe.
This is something that REALLY bothered me in this film. This SWAN learns how to read and write English and it is greeted with a 'oh, that's neat' by the humans. DOES NO ONE CARE that this swan is literate? Nobody? Not scientists, doctors....nobody? Really? Why the hell isn't he THE MOST FAMOUS ANIMAL IN THE WORLD? this is a world run by humans that supposedly grounded in reality.
Anyway, back on topic. He goes off for those months, is basically a young adult, shows he can read and write for five minutes, realizes no one can understand him, and then flies off to Boston to play the trumpet for ANOTHER few months. Yep, a trumpet playing literate swan and the world is like 'meh, he needs to go back into the wild and do...swan stuff'
You see, suspension of disbelief is that a swan can learn to read and write. It is also that a swan can play the trumpet with no lips. What is NOT is that the entire human race is going to greet this with a shrug and an 'oh that is neat,' mentality. That really just takes me out of it. Even if your premise is ridiculous it has to be grounded in some form of sanity or it makes the whole thing boring.
So when Louie comes back to his female friend Serena she's about to marry this other swan. Yeah he's a kind of self obsessed jerk but...he was actually THERE. He didn't abandon everyone for over a YEAR (which is apparently like their entire childhood of like 15 years in swan years) and then show up and go 'lol i want to marry her!'
The movie, despite it having over an hour run-time to develop only a few characters, the time wasn't utilized very well as we had scenes of a creepy bum guy taking advantage of Louie and nearly clipping his wings. For a story about a swan finding his voice, this whole 15 minute sequence really seemed unnecessary. I don't know why the writer thought it was necessary to write in a 'the father feels bad he stole a trumpet and now the son wants to pay it back' subplot and it was even more ridiculous when the owner was still butt-hurt over this a year later. If I were to tell my friends 'man, a year ago, a swan broke into my shop so i threw a trumpet at it, so it took it and flew away.' first my friends would laugh at me, then they would ask me why i would throw a trumpet at an endangered species bird in the first place and then get mad when it took the item I threw at it and flew away.
I honestly don't even know the moral this movie is trying to portray. Is the moral that If you can't communicate properly just keep trying until you can?
Even the 'villain' seemed very thrown in at the last minute. Seth green shows up in one scene when they're kids to say the mute kid can't play Marco polo, which.....yeah makes him look like a jerk but for all intents and purposes...a mute person really CAN'T play Marco polo. The swan shows up like 2 more times to go 'hey we should get married' and to be honest, the female swan never flat out tells him no. She hem and haws and finally accepts the proposal for no other reason than her father going 'hey you should totally accept his proposal' there is no threat, there is nothing at stake, she just accepts to marry someone she doesn't love after someone asks her a third time. It's like 'well...he DID care enough to ask three times. I guess that means I have to marry him now.'
This whole script was a complete mess. The pacing was terrible, the voices, while recognizable good voice actors, did not fit with the characters for the most part (which is a shame because I love me some Kath Soucie) and the ending was just crazy abrupt. I didn't feel like I learned anything in this movie or felt anything. It was just a kind of mess of....there.
I gave this movie a 4 because it isn't offensively bad or painful. The main issue is that it doesn't know what it wants and that it really is just boring. It's not a very interesting watch and very by the numbers. They tried to shoehorn in a romance that had no business being there in a story that didn't have any direction to begin with.
