Birds Like Us Parent Guide

In Birdabad, home to birds of all kinds, herbivorous birds must trade their eggs to the carnivorous birds for fruit. Hupu (Alicia Vikander) is unwilling to give up her one egg, so she escapes Birdabad along with her partner, Hasan (Kevin Bishop), but they are followed by the tyrannical Kondor (Jeremy Irons). Desperate to find a better life for her egg, Hupu will face any danger that gets in her way.

Before I begin, I challenge you, dear reader, to watch the trailer for this film. I want you all to know my pain. The animation is like a badly rendered PS2 game from 2001. I honestly did not think it was possible to make animation this dreadful in 2022. Did the animators scavenge a garbage dump for old computers in order to find low enough processing power? Were flip phones involved? Is this a student project that somehow got picked up by a distributor? Look, I get that animation is expensive, especially for smaller companies. But if you know you don’t have the resources for decent visuals, why would you embark on a production that is entirely focused on said visuals? There are some interesting creative ideas at work here, but they fall flat because the available technology simply can’t bring the concept to life.

On that note, this movie doesn’t have much of a story. Or characters. Or a setting. It’s primarily a sequence of nonsensical fantasy vignettes strung together by some birds with interchangeable, bland personalities who repeat the same lines of dialogue over and over. There are some generic philosophical ramblings from one character which I think are supposed to impart some wisdom but don’t actually make any sense. I think the writers might be trying to construct some sort of allegory, but they never reach any coherent destination. What results is a barely watchable, boring, muddled mess.

On a slight positive note, there is very little disturbing content to speak of (if you can stomach the idea of a society where birds have to swap their young for food), but that’s not enough for me to recommend anyone ever watch this movie. The human-bird hybrid face of Hupu will haunt me until the end of my days. Was that a beak or a mouth? Perhaps it is better left a mystery.