Happy Feet is a very strange film indeed, a feverish mix of Discovery Channel realism and Moulin Rouge-style inexplicable song and dance routines. Many contradictory ideas are flung in the ring and none really work, producing an exasperating 109 minutes in the cinema.
The premise is bizarre to begin with: Emperor Penguins each have a pop song that they start singing spontaneously in infancy (called, sickeningly, their ‘heart song’), which they later use to woo mates in choreographed sing-offs. Memphis (Hugh Jackman) and Norma Jean (Nichole Kidman), unnecessary and hideous Elvis and Marilyn Monroe-style penguins, meet in this good old-fashioned manner and soon have an egg. Memphis’s neglect during incubation means that their baby comes out all wrong; Mumble (Elijah Wood) cannot sing like all the other penguins, and has some hormonal problem that means he never fully goes through puberty, keeping some of his grey down. He sure can tap dance, though. Unfortunately tap dancing is ‘just not penguin’ (probably because with their strange ungainly bodies, even the moves of Fred Astaire look underwhelming when done by Emperor Penguin flippers ending up as a series of flappy noises, something the film-makers seem not to have realised), and the cute baby penguin is an outcast. His behaviour is deemed so subversive that when food becomes scarce, the elders of the community blame his heresy and cast him out.
What follows is the familiar Lion King story of Mumbles making some ‘amusing’ new friends (mostly voiced by Robin Williams) before his triumphant return to his home. This journey is a lot more disturbing than what we have seen before in the cute animal animation genre, however. He is chased by scary seals, whales, and captured by humans. The insane asylum atmosphere of the zoo is so effective that it may put children off them for life. The film goes from being a familiar story of an outsider gaining acceptance to a crusading parable for environmentalism, as Mumble realises that it is humans, not he, that are disrupting the food chain in the Antarctic. After forcing us to face grim reality, the ending is a huge cop-out, with a completely ridiculous turn of events (if humans ever saw penguins tap dancing, I don’t think we’d see it as an obvious plea to stop over fishing the seas).
The action is punctuated by song and dance numbers of familiar standards by the penguins, with Brittany Murphy as the sexy siren singing her heart out. These were quite infectious, but the makers of the film should have decided whether they were going for a frothy musical, or a worthy tale of our neglect of the environment. This uncertainty is also reflected in the visuals, as the characters and landscapes are beautifully designed to look as real as possible, but the characters are doing things that obviously penguins don’t do. If they’d have made them more ‘cute’ and anthropomorphic as in most animations, then this would not have been a problem. Obviously they wanted to cash in on the success of March of the Penguins by making it look as similar as possible to that documentary.
Maybe I am over analysing this. After all, it’s just a cartoon for children, and you’re supposed to suspend your disbelief. But the real crime is that Happy Feet just isn’t funny. Most of the high-profile CGI animations have succeeded by being amusing to both children and adults. I only laughed once. Most of the comedy is left to Robin Williams in two roles, giving him the chance to portray not one, but two racial stereotypes! It makes you glad that Hollywood isn’t producing any more motor-mouthed comedians to be hilarious cartoon sidekicks in the vein of Williams and Eddie Murphy.
This is a surreal and annoying mix of many ideas that just don’t gel. The film-makers got one thing right, though. They created the Emperor Penguin version of Elijah Wood perfectly: perma-pubescent and with piercing blue eyes always on the verge of tears.
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