Hear me out: ‘Surf’s Up’ is deep

What can a 2007 movie about surfing penguins teach us about mindfulness, ambition, and the creative process? Surprisingly, a lot.

Ignore its tepid Rotten Tomatoes score. “Surf’s Up” is a tour de force. 

While surfing — ha — YouTube, I realized I had access to the movie for free. I braced myself for cringe. Let me be clear: Media I enjoyed in middle school doesn’t tend to hold up in adulthood. Can I handle discovering this beloved childhood relic is Bad, Actually? I asked myself. I wasn’t sure. I dove in anyway. 

I’m relieved to report the water was fine. Honestly, better than fine. Turn’s out, the movie is really, really good. In its hour-and-a-half runtime, “Surfs Up” imparts a subtle yet sophisticated message about competition and craft — and does so with style and humor.

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At the heart of “Surf’s Up” is the relationship between Cody (Shia LaBeouf), an impulsive young penguin who dreams of surfing success, and Big Z (Jeff Bridges), a washed up ex-professional surfer who everyone thinks is dead — and who Cody idolizes. Through a series of events at turns comical and strange, Cody winds up face-to-face with his hero on the remote beaches of Pengu Island just days before the annual Big Z Memorial Surfing Competition. Here, he has the golden opportunity to learn from Z in time to challenge Tank Evans (Dietrich Bader), the island’s returning surfing champ and all around “Dirty Trashcan Full of Poop.”

There’s just one problem: Z has no interest in competition. He believes surfing should be done for its own sake, not for a shiny trophy. He’s so adamant about this, in fact, that for years he has completely cut himself off from the rest of the world.

What follows is a push and pull between Cody, who wants Z to teach him tangible technical skills yesterday, and Z, who wants Cody to lighten up and learn to just, like, ride the waves of life, man. Finally, Cody gets chill-pilled: Despite himself, he starts having some fun, and it translates to better surfing. 

The subtext is, of course, that success in itself is an empty goal. To reap the true rewards of an activity, we must learn to hold it loosely and enjoy it for its own sake.

If this were a different movie, that tidy mindfulness lesson capped off with a dance party set to Sugar Ray, might be the end. But this is a film nuanced enough to contain both poop jokes and meditations on meditation, and the full lesson it imparts is less trite.

It communicates it by turning its lens on the motivations of Big Z when, even after all the learning-to-let-go of it all, Cody still wants to do the contest. This makes Z angry, and the argument that follows exposes a dark truth: Beneath Z’s beach bum demeanor is a person — er, penguin — who’s afraid. Afraid of being seen as a failure for disappearing after his final surfing appearance, afraid of making an effort again and feeling humiliated. In this respect, Cody, who believes in giving activities his all even when it ends in disappointment, has something to teach the old man. 

I won’t spoil the ending (though you’ve had almost two decades to watch it), but I will say this. In exploring the differences between Cody and Z, “Surf’s Up” interrogates whether we should strive to perform our craft at the highest level, using it to engage with the world, or embrace a more ascetic path, deepening our appreciation for an activity in meditative solitude. To that question, it leaves viewers with a resounding “it depends,” ultimately advocating a balance between Z’s contemplative approach and Cody’s bullish ambition, between solitary self-confinement and desperate validation-seeking. With its final scene of Cody blissfully riding the tube of a wave with his friends looking on, it implies that between these two extremes is something like “flow,” what the late psychologist Mihaly Czikzentmihalyi describes as a state of both effortlessness and control.

“Flow is being completely involved in an activity for its own sake,” wrote Czikszentmihalyi. “The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz.”

At the same time, “Flow is hard to achieve without effort.” “Competition is an easy way to get into flow.” 

The reminder is as timeless as it is poignant. It’s not hard to get so caught up in a particular vision of success or of oneself that we forget why we do what we do in the first place, turning activities we love into chores or coping mechanisms. Whether we write novels or ride waves, flow offers a path forward and back — to the joy and challenge of just doing. 

That a 17-year-old children’s movie about surfing penguins can convey this nuanced truth — with humor, wit, and visuals that still hold up — is nothing short of a cinematic triumph.