NEW ULM — The New Ulm Film Society continues to ride the wave of mockumentary films with a screening of the film “Surf’s Up.”

The screening starts at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 13 at the New Ulm Public Library.

“Surf’s Up” was released in 2007 and represented a mash-up of two popular comedy sub genres: mockumentaries and penguin movies.

“Surf’s Up” revolves around a film crew who is covering the annual “Big Z Memorial Surf Off” on Pen Gu Island. The crew follows around several of the surfing competitors — all of whom are birds. Most of the film follows a young penguin Cody Maverick, voiced by Shia LaBeouf, who leaves his small town with the dream of winning the contest. Maverick is determined to win the contest because he once met Big Z, the namesake of the surfing contest. Big Z inspired him to keep surfing despite local opposition. However, once on Pen Gu Island, Maverick finds out he still has a lot to learn about surfing and the legacy of his hero.

On its surface “Surf’s Up” seems like an unusual genre-hybrid, but mockumentaries and animated penguin films were trending in 2007.

By the early 2000s, the mockumentary had become a mainstream genre. Reality television popularized characters talking directly to camera. Two years before Surf’s Up was released, the American version of “The Office” premiered and quickly became one of the most popular sitcoms. The mockumentary was no longer a fridge genre, but a household concept. Unlike mockumentaries from the ’80s and ’90s, the average movie goers could be expected to understand and even appreciate using the documentary style to tell a fictional story. This allowed filmmakers to further experiment with the mockumentary style.

At the same time as mockumentaries were getting experimental, there was a rising trend of family centric films about penguins. In 2005 a popular documentary called “March of the Penguins” was released to theaters. The same year, the animated kids film “Madagascar” premiered. The breakout characters from the CGI cartoon were a group of mischievous penguins. One year later in 2006 another animated film called, “Happy Feet” was released. It also centered around talking penguins.

In this environment, it was only a matter of time before a studio created a mockumentary about penguins.

However, “Surf’s Up” is more than a combination of two popular sub-genres. The film pays homage to several different filmmaking styles. Every mockumentary is a parody of certain type of genre. “Surf’s Up” is specifically satirizing the surfing documentary and surfing films in general. Surfing has been a popular subject of documentaries for decades going back to the 1966 documentary “The Endless Summer” which followed two surfers on an around-the-world surfing adventure to find “the perfect wave.” A few years before “Surf’s Up” release, the documentary “Riding Giant” detailed the history of surfers seeking out the biggest wave. There have also been dozens of fictional narratives about surfing and surfing contests.

Though “Surf’s Up” is an animated comedy, it does pay respect to the legacy of surfing movies. It is also a film that respects the concept of the mockumentary and has fun with basic approach.

Unlike live-action mockumentaries, “Surf’s Up” doesn’t need to worry about a physical camera person recording the scenes. There is no physical camera person in an animated movie. The camera is able to move through a scene free of normal physical restraints. However, the filmmakers made the choice to deliberately place obstacles on the camera. Certain scenes are shot as if being filmed on a handheld camera. The camera movement is deliberately bouncy and uneven as if the camera person is attempting to aim the camera. There are even a few scenes where the camera lens is hit by objects and even damaged.

The filmmakers took extra effort to add imperfections into the shots to make the story feel more like a documentary. They achieved this effect by building actual three-dimensional locations on a computer. Each character and environment in “Surf’s Up” was fully rendered on the computer and then animated. Once the 3D scene was animated, the digital camera could move through the scene and film from which ever angle seemed appropriate. This means “Surf’s Up” is the rare animated film in which the directors were able to film multiple takes from different angles.

It is an unusual approach, but it makes “Surf’s Up” one of the more unique films in both the mockumentary and animated penguins genre.

The New Ulm Film Society’s screening of “Surf’s Up” is free to the public. Before and after the film, there will be a discussion about the film’s place in film history.