Penguins Dancing Amusing for All Ages

Every couple of years children's movies journey to a different world. They've moved from toys to bugs to monsters to machines in recent years, and now they've shifted to penguins.

In each case, the plot has been very similar. A mixture of mystery or mission is added to parental or romantic love, and everything turns out well at the end. The appeal of the films, from Shrek to Robots to A Bug's Life, obviously rests in the world created by the filmmakers and the quality of the dialogue. In the CAC movie for this week, Happy Feet, the first of these, the penguin world, succeeds admirably, while the dialogue and plot sometimes falter.

The story is partially a parody of the documentary style of the recent March of the Penguins, as a deep narrative voice plays over certain sections. We find out later that this voice is an old penguin "wise-man" chronicling the story of our hero, Mumble "Happy Feet" (Elijah Wood). The movie, however, opens with the courtship of his parents and an introduction to the fictional world of the emperor penguin.

Penguin society, we find out, is based around singing, especially in courtship. Mumble's parents, Norma Jean (Nicole Kidman) and Memphis (Hugh Jackman), happen to sing as Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, quickly fall in love and have an egg, after which she leaves to go fishing as he guards the egg. The men huddle together against the wind, chanting in unison under the guidance of Noah the Elder (Hugo Weaving), to 'Guin, the penguin God.

During this chanting, Memphis drops the egg, which then hatches into Mumble. He is tone-deaf, but a tap-dancing natural. This talent, unfortunately, goes against the deeply set penguin ways. Also, his plumage only grows in halfway, and as a result of his strangeness, he is treated as an outcast by the other penguins, with the exception of Gloria (Brittany Murphy), the best songstress in his class, and his mother. Aside from this characteristic, these characters are pretty flat and provide, to my mind, pretty creepy dialogue in the ending scenes.

After graduation of Mumble's class, he gets separated from his group and finds another set of penguins whose courtship is based on dancing. This group, led by Ramon and Lovelace (Both voiced by Robin Williams), gives him the confidence to attempt to catch the eye of Gloria. The attempt succeeds and in doing so threatens the elders view of the penguin way of life. In retaliation, they blame him for a shortage of fish and banish him.

In order to validate his existence, Mumble sets out with his friends from the other group to prove that "aliens," or human beings, are responsible for the fish shortage. He finds them, leading to a section of the movie in step with Al Gore's recent An Inconvenient Truth. Of course, as it is a children's movie, we must receive a happy ending, one that the movie delivers in the form of a halting of Antarctic fishing, along with a feel-good, end of the movie dance session.

The movie succeeds in general. The world is intriguing, the dialogue is generally good, especially that involving the Robin Williams voiced characters and we're left in a good mood. If there's one element in which the movie falters, it's that it is a little bit crammed. Several sections feel slightly glossed over, without the emotional weight that they should have. Luckily, this is minor, and the movie can easily pass as a close relative of any of the entertaining children's movies of the past five or six years.