Review of Happy Feet (2006) by Markb. — 18 Dec 2006

You've got to give this to us Americans: we may be polarized as never before on war, politics and religion, and completely unable to come to a consensus on who the most deserving Survivor or American Idol is.

..but we sure do love us some penguins! (Put Chilly Willy atop the Christmas tree on the lawn of a public school or government office, and I'd wager that even the ACLU will keep is mitts off.) George Miller's strange-but-charming Happy Feet theorizes that if a papa penguin drops the egg, it won't kill the chick inside, as was so fervently, memorably anfd heartwrenchingly noted in March of the Penguins.

..it'll just rattle his innards, turning him into a mildly eccentric potential social outcast who can't sing like the rest of his breed, but can shake his tail feathers like Fred, Ginger AND Bojangles! Had Miller willingly agreed to jettison the quirkiness he brought to the money-losing Babe: Pig in the City (which nevertheless shot it to Number One on at least one major critic's Best Of list) and dispensed with the social/environmental messages altogether, he undoubtedly would've had an even bigger and more surefire box office smash.

..so let's all be grateful that Miller listened to HIS heartsong. And unlike all those pushy CGI-fests of the last few years that obnoxiously show off their pop culture smarts (meaning that their makers watch the same TV shows and listen to the same CDs as most of the audience) by shoehorning in hit songs just to score easy jokes and points, Happy Feet ingeniously and endearingly makes them Necessary To The Plot.

(And let's not hear anymore about the movie's scary sequences, involving predatory sea lions and other dangers, rendering it unsuitable for most kids. They endured Bambi's mother's death, Dumbo's painful separation from HIS mother, and Simba's extended scene with his father's corpse with very little discernible internal damage.

I rest my case.) Elijah Wood, voicing Mumble, displays more animation working behind the microphone than he did in all three Lord of the Rings movies (although Rugrats' E. G. Daily, providing his younger voice, helps immeasurably); Hugh Jackman is surprisingly overbearing as his dad, but Brittany Murphy (Little Black Book, Just Married), as Mumble's childhood friend with the potential to become Something More is even more surprisingly charming.

..and Robin Williams, playing two roles, is doubly-surprisingly bearable in both. The movie's warmheartedness does a lot to compensate for its somewhat shaky final half-hour, when it shifts gears from being a very imaginative variant on Chicken Little's outcast-gains-acceptance-AND-learns-to-love himself scenario and moves on to bigger issues, transforming rather abruptly ino An Inconvenient Truth: The Junior Edition.

Not that Miller hasn't inserted a few clues beforehand, or that the message (you can't really help others, on an individual or group basis, unless you learn to accept yourself first) ISN'T valuable or valid.

..but Mumble's hero's journey to to convince us humans to quit depriving them of all the fish necessary for their sustenance is flawed from a basic storytelling rather than a thematic viewpoint; it has a tendency to zigzag from point A to point Q while skipping Points B through P altogether.