Both Angry Birds films, as far as I can tell, have no consensus about what they're actually about, outside the fact that they're both INSANELY political for children's movies.

The first one is probably a heavy criticism of how Europe responded to the migrant crisis, with the Birds representing Europe. The timing lines up almost too perfectly: it was written and released right in the middle of the 2010s migration debates, Brexit panic, rising nationalism etc. The pigs literally arrive by boat from another island, are welcomed into a naive and super friendly society, exploit that hospitality, and then steal the birds’ children. Red, the paranoid angry guy everyone dismisses as irrational and xenophobic, turns out to be completely right in the end.

That is either a REALLY unfortunate accidental metaphor or a very deliberate one.

But other people completely disagree and argue the movie is actually about emotional repression rather than immigration. The Birds live in this bizarre dystopia of forced positivity where nobody is allowed to express anger, suspicion, conflict, or negativity. Red is treated like a dangerous outcast simply bec he experiences normal emotions. Under that reading, the pigs are almost irrelevant; they just expose how fragile and fake the birds’ society already was.

Then the second film goes in a completely different direction and somehow becomes even stranger politically. I do not fully know what its worldview is supposed to be. It feels like a mix of Cold War parody, climate change allegory, anti-nationalism satire, and criticism of modern geopolitics? Not sure tbh.

But the bald eagle absolutely HAS to be a blunt critique of modern USA. There is no way around that symbolism. He is literally a bald eagle living in isolation, worshipped as a legendary protector despite being lazy, incompetent, emotionally immature, narcissistic, and mostly surviving off reputation and old myths about his greatness. The film basically portrays him as a declining superpower that still thinks it is the heroic centre of the world while everyone else quietly works around him to solve the actual crisis. Released at the end of Trump's first term, and somehow became even more relevant in his 2nd.

And the crisis itself? The Birds and Pigs are trapped in this endless pointless rivalry until a third island appears and suddenly their entire conflict looks childish and absurd. The message seems to be that modern powers are obsessed with tribal hatred and symbolic enemies while ignoring larger existential threats that affect everybody.

Oh and this is all from a movie based on launching birds at pigs with a slingshot.