Review of Madagascar (2005) by Catherine S — 22 Oct 2011

Despite Madagascar having some entertaining moments, that can't make up for a shoddy plot idea, mediocre animation, unfunny jokes and pop culture references, as well as not very entertaining voice acting by a cast of Hollywood big names.

Madagascar stars four animals living in the Central Park Zoo: a lion named Alex (Ben Stiller), a zebra named Marty (Chris Rock), a giraffe named Melman (David Schwimmer), and a hippopotamus named Gloria (Jada Pikett Smith). During a transfer to a wild life preserve, the four animals' crates are knocked off the transfer ship and wash up on the island of Madagascar whose population is made up of party loving lemurs lead by their eccentric king Julian (Sacha Baron Cohen). As Alex slowly is driven insane from hunger, the other three animals must find a way to save their friend from himself.

You may think from my description of the plot that it sounds interesting, but it's not. It's basically "Survivor" with whiny animals instead of whiny people. The film is laden with pop culture references ranging from more understanble sources like "Castaway" to the out right odd references from "Twilight Zone". Used in minor amounts, this can work. But since I used the description of "laden", you can tell that they did sprinkle the film with pop culture references, no no they dumped them on the film. That's one of the major faults with Madagascar. Another is its animation. It was fairly good when it first came out, but as time went on I caught several major flaws with it and even slight animation glitches that were never caught. At times, it looks as if the animation had a few frames tooken out of it so the scenes look rushed. Other times, physics doesn't exist for a moment and looks lazy (a key example includes one scene where a monkey character hits another monkey character covered in cans with a newspaper. While some of the cans topple off like expected, others do a slight one inch bounce and land perfectly in the same spot they started on.) While the attention to detail is sometimes very impressive (especially the sand grains on Alex's tongue after landing on Madagascar), other parts are so rough that it's making Toy Story 1 look like Toy Story 3.

I guess for kids it's for the most part safe, though the excessive amounts of fart and butt jokes get very annoying very fast. Adults however, unless you like crude humor, will find little to enjoy here. (Real rating: 39%).