When I saw the commercials for
Happy Feet I thought it was going to be cutie penguins dancing, which still happened but its a classic 'there's something wrong with our child, circle peg in a square world.' It is a great story and hiralous. My best friend who barely laughs, laughed out loud a bunch of times throughout the film. It is the first effort from Warner Bros., produced in Australia by Village Roadhouse and directed by George Miller who co-wrote
Babe and directed the sequel, he wrote and directed the
Mad Max movies. This movie has real life songs, mostly Elvis and 70 disco songs and wonderfully mixed and not so annoying than say, that
Xena Musical. The story bascially is that all the emperor penguins sing and Mumble (named by his lady love Gloria when they were little) dances and can't sing. He doesn't fit in and is eventually kicked out the clan and he goes out to find 'the aliens' who seem to be responsible for the fish drought.
Mumble is voiced by Elijah Wood and T.G. Daily as a baby, his adult form looks like a overgrown form of his baby form. Britney Murphy shows off her singing skills as Gloria and Robin Williams plays two characters (eek but actually good) Ramon, one of Mumble's Latino friends and Lovelace, a puffed up 'guru' who chokes through half the movie with his neck stuck in one of those soda can rings. Steve Irwin plays a elephant seal and the movie is dedicated to him. There are parts that surprisingly pass through this PG movie like gyrating and a mention of possible suicide. The movie is deliciously dark, in one sequence Mumble is stuck in a zoo and all alone and goes crazy. Then we zoom out extremely out of the Earth with eerie music which is a pastiche of a sequence from
2001: A Space Odyssey, symbolic of the now conquered state of Mumble. There is one part that you think it's going to end with him chasing a ship endlessly. Also, the humans are a mix of live-action and CGI. They start out wiht CG but slowly dissolve into real life people.
