YMMV / Surf's Up

• Adorkable: Cody starts fanboying like crazy when he finds out that Geek is Big Z.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: When Lani berates Cody for caring more about the competition than her or Z, is she being fair or overdramatic? If it hadn't been for the competition, Cody would never have come to Pen Gu, and would never have got Z back to the beach. But at the same time, it can be said that Cody was thinking about his friends as a means to an end to get training and that he was being too singleminded instead of enjoying his time with them.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: As the movie came out after both March of the Penguins and Happy Feet caused a considerable backlash against penguin movies, a lot of people avoided this movie like the plague on "penguins on surf boards" alone. The film wound up underperforming at the box office, although it was well-reviewed by critics for ironically having elements that made it stand out among other penguin movies.
• Awesome Music:
  • "Legends", used to powerful effect in the flashback's to Z's surfing.
  • Special mention to the soundtrack consisting of 90's Alternative Rock songs, with some especially noteworthy examples including "Drive" by Incubus, not one but two Green Day songs ("Holiday" and "Welcome to Paradise", which are obviously Punk Rock in this case), "Reggae Got Soul" by 311, the immensely well-fitting "Into Yesterday" by Sugar Ray, and the One-Hit Wonder "You Get What You Give" by New Radicals.
• Cargo Ship: Tank and all his trophies. Also canon.
• Heartwarming Moments: Geek says he has no interest in the competition and tells Cody he won't attend. That turns out to be a lie, as he secretly watches from the jungle with a fatherly smile on his face.
• Once Original, Now Common
  • The concept of artificial Jitter Cam (created with a specialized Motion Capture camera) was pretty unique when the film first came out - and indeed, it's still unique for an animated feature. But, like all good things, it has been overdone to the point of sickness.
  • Improv in animated films. Here, it was a necessity. Ten years later, it's expected.
• Squick:
  • The cure for stings from a sea urchin. Peeing (or vinegar) can help clean out the injury and soothe the burn, but one should go see a medic as soon as possible afterward.
  • This movie's really fond of poop jokes. At one point, Cody even ends up water-sliding down into a glowing, jello-like pool of...glowworm poop.
• "Stop Having Fun" Guys: Arguably An Aesop of the whole film. Cody cares about beating the competition and takes surfing seriously. It isn't until he learns from Big Z that looking at sports from a competitive view ultimately ruins what makes them fun.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: By the filmmakers' own admission, the "animated mockumentary" gimmick was a little too ambitious and by the third act, the film becomes a more-or-less conventional family film simply to wrap up the story.
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • The film featured the best water effects ever for a CGI film at the time, even outdoing Finding Nemo, and it still looks impressive to this day. A big part of it is that the animators were able to properly simulate different types of wave displacement — foam, spray, and wakes — which allowed them to accurately portray different kinds of water, such as rough and choppy waters in the climax.
  • There's a reason the artificial Jitter Cam looks so real; it is real. The animators created a rig where they could virtually "film" scenes with an actual camera.
• Woolseyism: The Brazilian Portuguese dub, directed by Guilherme Briggs, is iconic for making several localizations to the film so the comedy and the feeling of a documentary would be preserved. Examples include Cody coming from "Frio de Janeiro" (frio meaning "cold" in Portuguese), Chicken Joe being from the Brazilian Pantanal in Mato Grosso, informal expressions common among surfers and many other adaptations still quoted by many Brazilian fans of the film.

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