Surf’s Up (PG) **** (From Richmond and Twickenham Times)

Surf’s Up (PG) ****

4:07am Thursday 9th August 2007 in Leisure By MILES FIELDER

Dir: Ash Brannon and Chris Buck
With: Shia LaBeouf, Jeff Bridges, Zooey Deschanel, Jon Heder, James Woods


One might have thought the entertainment possibilities of penguin movies had been exhausted with the sleeper hit documentary March of the Penguins and the animated musical Happy Feet. As this imaginative CG animation proves, however, there's yet more potential for fun in the little black-and-white waddlers.

Surf's Up is the comic tale of a runty rockhopper penguin named Cody Maverick (voiced by Shia LaBeouf) who leaves his Antarctic home and travels to the Hawaiian paradise Pen Gu island to participate in the annual penguin surfing championship.

There, Cody meets his hero, Big Z (Jeff Bridges doing a priceless riff on his Big Lebowski dude persona), the former surfing champ long thought dead but in fact quietly retired from the sport, and the pair strike up a mutually beneficial student/mentor relationship.

What raises the film's game is the simple but inspired idea of framing it as a documentary about the penguin sport, complete with vox-pop interviews, shaky camera and archive newsreel footage. Great fun for kids and adults alike, Surf's Up takes CG animation to the next level.