The feature film The Angry Birds Movie is not art. It is bizarre anti-immigration propaganda, in which a peaceful Park Slope-esque society of green-juice-swilling, yoga-doing, procreating birds faces near destruction because of its extremely naïve willingness to trust and accommodate foreign visitors with outwardly bad hygiene (pigs, who come en masse in the hull of a ship).

There is nothing in the rudimentary mobile game Angry Birds to suggest such a story. It's a puzzle game. Players of Angry Birds know that pigs are their enemies because they are explicitly told, not because the pigs are gradually revealed to have unsettling cultural dissimilarities to the protagonist.

But I digress, I am here to talk about what surely must be the first book based on a movie based on an app. Human culture has come so far.

the angry birds movie is candy-coated propaganda

There is, in the mobile game Angry Birds, a red bird who is angry. He appears in the film as well, and his name is Red! He appears in the free Kindle excerpt of the novelization of the movie as well, and his name is still Red. Very consistent.

Red (in the film The Angry Birds Movie) is the only bird with his beak to the air. No one else is smart enough to be suspicious — smart enough to be angry. That is not consistent with the game Angry Birds, in which all birds are angry. Red is angry, broadly, for no reason (except some bullying about his eyebrows), and lashes out with violence whenever slightly perturbed. That is not consistent with the mobile game, which involves blatant antagonism. Because Red is voiced by the sweetly sardonic Jason Sudeikis and the film is a cartoon, it was easy to play the violence for laughs.

In the free Kindle excerpt of the novelization of this movie, which is based on an app that had no story, it appears very hard to play violence for laughs. Take for instance, this very lame paragraph:

"Once, Red got angry at a bird that was standing too close to him in line at the Early Bird Worms shop and almost punched him. Another time he elbowed a mime in the stomach when he disturbed Red while he was reading. Red was known for chasing young birds away from his house when they made too much noise playing outside his beach hut. He even jammed his popcorn bucket on the head of another bird who sneezed on Red at the movies!

The Angry Birds Movie features a montage of Red committing all of these acts of violence — except the young bird playing too loudly outside his house doesn't get shooed, he gets punted into the ocean. Interesting revisionism! Take heart: the novelization of The Angry Birds Movie will surely be just as politically horrifying as the screenplay it is based on, but some specific acts of violence don't play well on page and will be left out.

The free Kindle excerpt of the novelization of The Angry Birds Movie also contains a prologue, which explains how Red is "an honorary uncle" to a set of blue bird triplets that [SPOILER] had sort of seemed to commit suicide by slingshotting themselves into the ocean at the end of the film. Glad to know they are still alive and being intellectually nurtured by a xenophobe.

The free Kindle excerpt of the novelization of The Angry Birds Movie also makes liberal use of ellipses, which reminds me of many portions of The Angry Birds Movie which were extremely long, boring, and needless.