What do people seem to love as much as singing competitions? How about jukebox musicals?
Or maybe movies starring lovable anthropomorphic characters? Well, Illumination has managed to
combine all three into one film franchise that can be summed up with one word:
Sing. With its sequel just hitting theatres, we decided to break down the characters of
both “Sing” and “Sing 2” to see who’s pure and good, and who’s about as pleasant as a sour note.
I’m Kyle with WickedBinge, and this is SING: Good to Evil.
As always, we’ll be starting with our most pure and noble characters before working our way down.
These characters are the Good.
Easily earning our Gold Medal of Good is Meena. While her incredible singing talents may have
remained a mystery to most due to her stage fright, her big heart was clear from the very
beginning. She’s an incredibly kind and gentle girl, and is always seen being friendly and kind
towards people. She’s often baking sweets to try and cheer others up, like she tries to do with
Buster. Speaking of Buster, although she had meant to try and get herself another audition,
Meena is still willing to step up and be a stage-hand when Buster asks her to.
Towards the climax of the first movie, it’s Meena’s talent as a singer
as well as her willingness to try and the encouragement and inspiration she gives
Buster that leads to the theatre gang eventually succeeding with their show.
Although she may not be heroic in the traditional sense, Meena is definitely the most pure out of
the entire Sing cast. For this, we felt that we had to give her our top spot!
For our Silver Medal of Good, we’re awarding it to Rosita. Although she originally dreamed
of being a singer, she gave up this dream in order to be a devoted housewife and mother of
25 piglets. As such, we see that Rosita is an incredibly hard-worker,
and although she does abandon her household duties to be in the show,
she makes sure to first create a machine to take care of her family. Sure,
the machine does malfunction, but that wasn’t due to anything on Rosita’s part. Rosita also
seems to act like the Team Mom of the group, like when she tries to comfort Ash after her break-up.
Her most heroic act was saving Buster’s life in the climax of the second movie, pushing herself
to get over her fear of heights so that Buster didn’t get hurt. So yeah, Rosita can be pretty
brave too. For all the hard-work that she does, she more than earns a high ranking on our list.
Getting our Bronze Medal of Good is another pig character, Gunter. Not only is Gunter one of
the most fun characters in the films, but he’s also one of the most positive! Much like Meena,
Gunter is a pure-hearted character who doesn’t seem to have a mean bone in his body.
Throughout the first movie, Gunter is encouraging towards Rosita and tries to help her become more
comfortable with dancing. He tries to help her loosen up and shed her inhibitions so that she
can let out her own brand of ‘piggy power’, and is just a great friend to her. Heck, Gunter even
volunteers to babysit all 25 of Rosita’s kids in one of the DVD shorts. Certainly not an easy task,
yet he does it with a smile on his face. Simply put, Gunter is just an all-around nice guy,
and although he can be somewhat of an airhead, we can’t take off too many points for that.
Up next is the spiky punk-rock singer, Ash. It would have been easy to make Ash standoff-ish or
someone who thought she was ‘too cool’ to hang out with or help her fellow competitors. Thankfully,
Ash has a pretty good heart under all those quills. Although some describe her as a ‘moody
teenager’, she’s just as much of a team player as the rest of the gang. She encourages Buster to put
on the show even when it seems like all is lost, and even after she goes solo, Ash never forgets
about her friends. She truly gets to shine in the second movie through her scenes with Calloway,
just through how sympathetic and encouraging she can be. While many teen characters might
fall into mean and sarcastic, Ash thankfully doesn’t fall into any of those pitfalls.
Moving on, we have Eddie Noodleman. Eddie is Buster's best friend, and while he doesn’t
always believe in Buster’s plans, he always seems to be by his side. Though he can be
extremely lazy at times, thanks to his pampered lifestyle, Eddie doesn’t really falter when it
comes to being Buster’s friend. He gives Buster a place to stay, and then Buster’s forced to start
washing cars to make a living, Eddie volunteers to help dry them. D’aww, how sweet! Later on,
when Meena decides that she wants to be in the show, it’s Eddie that takes over as the stagehand
and helps put on the gang’s show. He may not be a performer, but he’s still a great guy.
Next up is Buster’s elderly assistant, Miss Crawly. Falling into the ‘kooky old lady’ trope,
Miss Crawly can be more than a little bit ditzy, as well as pretty clumsy. But while it is her
mistake that causes the flier to read ‘$100,000’ instead of only a thousand, this really was just
an accident - and one that she’s extremely apologetic about. Though she may not share
Buster’s passions, Crawly does all she can to help him. This shows how intensely loyal she is
to Buster, happily sticking by him even after the destruction of the Moon Theatre. Crawly also takes
the time to teach Johnny how to play the piano, even when it takes hours of her own free time.
While she may sometimes be seen as a liability due to all of her mistakes, in terms of personality
and morality, Crawly really is one of the best employees a person like Buster could ask for.
We’ve now come to another one of the newer characters, Nooshy. Nooshy is a streetwise lynx,
as well as an incredible dancer. As such, it’s no surprise when Johnny comes to her for help.
Though she sees him as a ‘weirdo’ at first, it really doesn’t take Nooshy very long to
agree to be Johnny’s coach, and she’s patient and kind while teaching him. During Johnny’s
big performance, it’s Nooshy who encourages him to keep going when it looks like he’s going to fail.
All in all, Nooshy is incredibly supportive and a great friend.
And speaking of Johnny, we’re actually ranking him next. Despite being part of a gang family,
Johnny is a good kid at heart. He has no interest in committing crimes, and despite being a literal
gorilla, he’s pretty gentle and kind, if a bit awkward. However, Johnny can be pretty reckless
at times - even causing a huge car pile-up at one point. He also nearly stole the prize money in the
first movie, only stopping when he learned that Buster thought he had potential. Although he had
planned to use the stolen money to get his dad out of jail, it still wasn’t a great moment for him.
But even with these noticeable flaws, Johnny’s goodness still manages to shine through.
Next up is another new character, Rockstar Legend Clay Calloway. Formerly a rock star legend, Clay
isolated himself from the rest of the world after the death of his beloved wife. Because of this,
Clay can sometimes come off as a bit gruff, a bit anti-social and somewhat hostile. However,
he never really gets to the point of being a jerk about it, even if he does occasionally snap at
others. He ends up taking Ash’s words to heart, and helps the gang with their show, which shows
that he can be selfless. He even encourages Buster not to run away. Not bad for an old rock star.
Wrapping up the Good Tier, we’ve finally come to the koala who started it all - Buster Moon. For
all his optimism and encouragement, Buster can also be somewhat sneaky,
inconsiderate and not exactly honest. He has a bad habit of promising more than he can deliver,
a habit that he carries over into the sequel when he promises to have Calloway in his show
before he’s even spoken to him. Buster can also be a bit pushy with his performers, asking them
to learn a new skill or pushing them towards a certain music genre. We should also note that he
didn’t have any qualms with stealing power and electricity for his theatre in the first movie,
and while the flier mistake wasn’t on him, he was the one who continued to lie about it. So yeah,
Buster really isn’t the most honest guy. However, he is kind and encouraging towards his performers
and employees, and in general is more good-hearted than bad. He could certainly stand to be a bit
more moral, but even as he stands, Buster still manages to make it into the Good Tier.
With those characters out of the way,
it’s time to focus on our more neutral characters as we move into the Grey Area.
We’re starting off this tier with Nana Noodleman. She’s Eddie's grandmother as well as an incredibly
talented singer who inspired Buster during her glory days. She’s a bit snobbish and standoff-ish,
and it takes a lot for her to be impressed. Nana does, however, still have a heart underneath all
that wool. Although it took a while for Buster to earn her respect, Nana ultimately gave it
to him once he and his singers were able to impress her. Afterwards, Nana buys the theatre,
allowing Buster to continue his dream. We also see Nana continuing to support Buster in the sequel,
encouraging him after he and his cast are rejected by a talent agent. Although she grew to be a lot
kinder than she first appeared, we still felt that her frequent insults of her nephew and
that attitude she held for most of the first film were enough to land her a spot in the Grey Tier.
Next up, we have Crystal Entertainment talent scout, Suki. She starts off as a typical talent
agent, being fairly haughty and even leaving Buster’s show before the second act, telling them
that they “aren’t good enough”. However, once the crew begins working with Crystal Entertainment,
Suki begins to soften up somewhat. She also ends up being the one to free Buster from the closet
after Jimmy locks him in, telling him to get out of Redshore City while he can. In the end,
we see Suki supporting Buster and his performers, actually helping them with
their efforts when it comes to getting more performances at major theatres. While she may
have started off as dismissive, it was nice to see Suki turn around and become more of an ally.
Managing to rank a bit higher than we would have thought, next is Porsha Crystal. As the last name
implies, she’s the daughter of Jimmy Crystal, who we’ll get to in a bit. She starts off as a bit of
an over-eager starlette, and can be somewhat of a drama queen. It’s also Porsha’s breakdown over
believing that she’s been fired that puts Buster’s life at risk. However, we can’t fully blame Porsha
for this, as it was a mistake on Porsha’s fault and she never told her father to get revenge on
Buster for her. Thankfully, she also forgives easily, and is more than happy to join the show
in the film’s climax. Guess she turned out to not be such a spoiled princess after all.
Surprisingly, this tier is where we find Johnny’s father, Big Daddy. He’s a gorilla gang leader,
and while he obviously qualifies as a criminal, we feel he doesn’t quite do enough to be considered
‘evil’, as Big Daddy and his gang mostly stick to bank robberies. Still, he can be pretty stern and
even harsh towards Johnny, even though he still cares about him and doesn’t necessarily want
to be mean. After all, he managed to brush off Johnny accidentally running him over,
caring more about Johnny managing to get his speed up during their get-away driver practices. He did
briefly disown Johnny, but after realizing just how talented his son was, Big Daddy apologized
and decided to support Johnny’s dreams of being a singer. He doesn’t play a huge role in the sequel,
but we do see Big Daddy and his gang at the final performance, where they manage to stop Jimmy and
his security team from getting in and stopping the show. As such, we know that Big Daddy kept
his promise, and honestly, it’s just nice to see that he’s continuing to support his son.
Managing to stay out of the bad tier by the skin of his mouse teeth, we have Mike. Despite his tiny
size, he manages to have a big personality, wooing people over with his Frank Sinatra-esque voice
while having a pretty arrogant attitude. Because of this, Mike usually tends to come off as pretty
rude, often insulting his fellow competitors. He also isn’t the most moral guy around,
given that he frequently cheats at cards and then just takes the money when he gets caught. However,
we can’t really call him evil or a villain, even if he is a jerk. While he has no issues
with casually throwing insults around, Mike never tries to outright hurt someone or
sabotage his competition. He also shows respect towards Meena when he’s wowed by her singing,
and seems to genuinely care about his girlfriend despite originally only falling for her looks.
It really is a shame that we never got to see Mike grow beyond his arrogant persona in the sequel.
Alright, time for a villainous musical number! These final few characters are the Bad to Evil.
We decided to give our Bronze Medal of Evil to the Russian Bear Mob.
The first Sing film only had two real villains - the bank that was trying to take the theatre away,
and the trio of bear mobsters. Considering that the bank representative was just doing her job
and had been fairly patient on her part, we felt that the bears were the bigger antagonists,
as they threatened to eat Mike before trying to steal the competition’s prize
money for themselves. Through this, they end up being partially responsible for
the destruction of the theatre. Later after Mike seems to escape with his girlfriend,
one bear manages to catch up to them. What makes this particularly noteworthy is that
we don’t see Mike again at the end of the film with the rest of the cast, nor does he appear
in the sequel. We can’t say for certain that the bears managed to actually eat Mike, getting their
revenge once and for all, but the implication is still enough to get them on this list.
Earning our Silver Medal of Evil is the harsh Klaus Kickenklober. Klaus is the type of
teacher that absolutely no one wanted. When it comes to dance, he demands perfection and has
very little patience for failure. Despite Johnny obviously trying his best, Klaus continues to push
him and put him down for his mistakes. Simply put, this guy’s a pretty terrible teacher. What
really elevates him to a villain, however, are his actions during the second film’s climax. During
Johnny’s dance battle number, Klaus takes the place of Johnny’s original performance partner and
tries to undermine the gorilla’s performance. If it weren’t for Nooshy’s encouragement, Klaus would
have completely ruined Johnny’s performance and possibly even his career. What keeps Klaus from
falling any lower is that, after Johnny proves him wrong, Klaus finally gives Johnny his respect.
Getting our Gold Medal of Evil, we have Jimmy Crystal. Being the Big Bad of the sequel,
he’s the owner of Crystal Entertainment. Caring only about his reputation, Jimmy can be extremely
intimidating, harsh and cruel - even to his daughter! This escalates to a whole new level
when Jimmy follows through on his promise to throw Buster off a roof. Later on, when Porsha is
brought back into the show, Jimmy tries to force her to quit, caring more about his image than
her happiness. Jimmy then tries one final time to kill Buster before getting arrested at the end of
the movie. Simply put, Jimmy is as cut-throat as they come with pretty much no positive attributes.
He doesn’t even have a good excuse to go after Buster, unlike what the bears had with Mike. All
of these qualities made him the perfect recipient for the title of Most Evil Sing Character.
But let us know in the comment section if you agree with our ranking,
and tell us what we should cover next! Remember to hit that notification
bell and binge our Good to Evil playlist, where we break down the morality of the
characters in your favorite cartoons, shows and movies. But most importantly, stay wicked!