Cards on the table: I’ve had grumbles in the past about some of the work of Illumination Entertainment to date, and in particular, its continued struggle to find  narratives to marry up to its quite excellent work in creating characters, and in on-screen comedy. As much as I chuckle through the Despicable Me movies, when it came to something like The Secret Life Of Pets, I felt the concept was great, but the story wasn’t. Once the pets left their homes, it all felt disappointingly generic. This is the bit I’d braced myself for. I gave up watching television talent shows due to their willingness to ridicule human beings, viewing them as collateral damage in the ratings war. Jennings isn’t playing that game, though, and thus we don’t get a procession of terrible auditions. Instead, he carves out a succession of small, interesting and varied characters, who each have emotional and/or financial reasons for taking to the stage.  The stand outs include Taron Egerton’s Cockney gangster, Johnny, the hard rock of Scarlett Johansson’s Ash, and Reese Witherspoon’s charming Rosita. I found myself, slowly, rooting for each of them. Where Sing soars is when it spends time with its cast of characters, who I could easily imagine would head off to for a beer or two after work and share stories of the challenges they face. Were they not all animals. It’s just an amiable, likeable bunch. I do hope that Jennings gets the chance to do more with them. Sing plays broadly, too, with a songbook that could genuinely fill a good three or four soundtrack albums. If you’re allergic to popular pop choons, it’s best to brace yourself. But also, if you’re hunting for a fun animated adventure, that a family can enjoy, one that actually has kindness at heart of it, it’s a sweet movie, this. And for Illumination, what it lacks in minions, it makes up for in a story that feels like it’s doing more than servicing requisite set pieces.