Free Birds

I'm not sure what this movie was trying to do.  The messages and images were all over the place.  Before I get into it, let's talk about the story.

Reggie is a turkey who is well aware that, come November, he and his friends are to be eaten.  Just before Thanksgiving, Reggie is selected by the President to be the recipient of a pardon (this is real thing that happens every year) and brought to live at Camp David.  Reggie is soon taken by another turkey named Jake who insists that they steal a time machine from an underground government facility and use it to travel back to the first Thanksgiving and prevent the tradition of turkey eating from being started.

The animation in Free Birds is pretty good.  The jokes are rarely funny.  The actors sound like they're sleepwalking through their performances.  It's not a terrible movie.  It's more bland than anything.  What is interesting about the movie are the various messages being presented in the movie.  Let's look at some of those.

1) Animal cruelty- Reggie is a "free range" turkey.  Jake was raised in a turkey factory.  Jake's origin flashback is a very short scene, but it plays out like a PETA video.  It's all cages and mechanization.  Turkeys are force fed to fatten them up for slaughter.  But the logical point to showing these images is never addressed.  Are we to promote vegetarianism?  No.  Even the turkeys eat pizza with meat toppings (anchovies, but still).  So, just promote "free range" turkey then?  No.  We're not supposed to what Reggie to be eaten.  Even wild turkeys are off the menu.  That a movie would be so specific about not eating turkey is very odd.

2) Native American genocide- The wild turkeys that Reggie and Jake befriend in the past are Indians.  Like full on war paint and feather headdresses.  The Pilgrims don't just want to kill a few turkeys for dinner.  They want to exterminate the turkeys.  It's all very uncomfortable especially in a kid's movie.

3) The Holocaust- So many of the images, not just of the turkey genocide but also Jake's captivity, are straight out of the Holocaust.  Free Birds is, at times, the low-quality children's version of Schindler's List.  Not that kid's can't learn about that stuff.  It's just a matter of having a point.  In Free Birds, it's just for the sake of imagery and feels weirdly exploitative.  Kids already have an amazing, animated movie detailing the struggles of Jewish animals.  It's called An American Tail.

If Free Birds had been explicitly about an innocent-yet-imprisoned man who is pardoned and teams up with a Holocaust survivor in order to travel through time to convert American to vegetarianism and, in the process, they prevent the slaughter of the American Indian by early settlers, I would've been on board for at least the insanity of it.  Instead, we get a cartoon about turkeys trying to stop Thanksgiving from being a holiday.  It's too bad that the movie didn't make much money.  I hear the sequel would've been about chickens who travel back in time to stop the resurrection of Jesus, so that people will stop stealing their eggs for Easter.  I'd watch that movie.

4 out of 10