"If my name was Bobby, would you ask about my hobbies? Or if my name were Judas, would you ask me what my mood is? I laugh, I cry, I love, I hate, I do so much more than detonate."
- Bomb, The Angry Birds Movie (2016)
Ever since the debut of the first Angry Birds game in 2009, the beautifully bizarre world where birds slingshot themselves at pigs to save their stolen eggs has become a massive multi-media franchise branching out to films, webtoons and more for thirteen years now. While Angry Birds may have grown popular for it's fun playing style and wacky concept, I think the true reason the game's characters have grown as iconic as they are is there are parts of everyone's personalities that can resemble every major Angry Bird.
I get it, you think it sounds bizarre and you're right. But hear me out: each Angry Birds character's traits are just amplified versions of a select part of everyone's personality, and I will explain in this blog post.
In the beginning of the first Angry Birds Movie, when we're introduced to Red he goes through things we can all relate too. A customer's a jerk to him for honestly getting into a tight mixup and running late for a birthday party, he get's frustrated when realizing that the girls at the park are flirting with the muscular bird behind him rather than Red and he doesn't want people to mess with him so he can just go about his day-to-day business.
So we've kind of all been there where we've just had awful days and just wanted to be left alone, but we're sold to Red's character when we see that he's just misunderstood. His parents abandoned him as an egg so he's never had a family and all the other kids would bully him for it, so sure he may be a jerk to everyone and might've moved away from the village but deeps down he just wants people to care about him and is afraid to let other people into his life.
This is something we can all relate too; we've all had bad days where we haven't wanted people to mess with us and we've felt deeply misunderstood for just being who we are. That's why Jason Sudeikis' Red performance was so embraced by Angry Birds fans in 2016. However, Red wasn't the only character from that movie my friends and I identified with.
Chuck represents that part of all of us that's super anxious to get through all the boring stuff and just wants to have a good time. He's also that cool, weird and funny type of dude in every iteration which are all fun traits that we have at least a bit of in all of us so Chuck can also represent that corner of human personality.
Bomb's the part of us that makes mistakes, and while we can't all relate to dangerously detonating whenever you concentrate to hard or feel a strong emotion we've all definitely felt embarrassed by ourselves at times and grown to loathe our weaknesses. But the reason Bomb's arc is so good is because he learns to use his greatest weakness as his greatest strength which is inspiring to anyone.
While he may be a pig Leonard has lots of human-like emotions serving as a green-skinned omelet-obsessed embodiment of confidence, pride, enthusiasm and big-ego-ness (for lack of a better term), which is kind of along the same lines of Mighty Eagle's character though he mainly represents the fear of commitment and lack of energy we all get on some days.
This isn't it; Matilda is fun and peaceful, Terrence is brooding and grumpy, the Blues are playful, Hal is freaky, Stella is always excited, Bubbles is quirky and the Judge Bird is, well, judgy, which are all traits that can be attributed to just about anybody at one point or another. Therefore, each of the Angry Birds embody all the important personality traits that everybody can feel more or less of any day, so that's what I think makes these characters so appealing.
So we all have a wee bit of Angry Bird in us, and it's elements from every bird. Some day we may be feeling more Red, other days we may be feeling more Matilda and I've been actually feeling like the Free Hugs guy most if I'm honest with you! Who's your spirit Angry Bird? Let me know in the comments! Thank you all for reading and I hope you have a great week.
Stay geeky,
-Jack Higgins
For more Geek Gossip content in which I get into my thoughts on The Angry Birds Movie, you can listen to some classic episodes or read some of the best Jack's Soapbox posts by clicking these links: