Everyone’s a little scared that things are changing for the worse, and no one understands why.Īnd there’s the real genius of Happy Feet. Even cute fluffy dancing penguins.” The penguins have religion: they sing in the dark of winter to turn the Earth and bring back the sun and the warmth, and Mumble’s heresy with this dancing nonsense is angering the Great ’Guin, the tribe’s elders warn. You may think we’re alone, but we aren’t, and everything we do impacts everyone else. The film opens in space, zooms in on our planet and down to Antarctica, and right about here, you start to realize that that was not just some cool clever way to segue into the story: this is the film saying, “Welcome to Planet Earth. It’s in Mumble’s journey that Miller’s real purpose shows itself. It ain’t penguin, his father grumbles, but Mom supports her strange son as he goes off on a quest to– well, you know how these stories work.

(Clever of Miller to cast Nicole Kidman as Norma Jean in a near-reprise of her Rouge role.)īut then there’s the son of Memphis and Norma Jean, Mumble (the voice of Elijah Wood as an adolescent before that, he’s all cute baby-talk from cartoon vet Elizabeth Daily: The Incredibles), who can’t find his song, but he sure likes to dance. And if it’s the songs that intrigue potential mates… well, then, why wouldn’t a penguin named Memphis coo sweet rockabilly songs to the ladies? (Hearing Hugh Jackman, as the voice of Memphis, do Tom Jones via Elvis Presley might be worth the price of admission alone.) Why wouldn’t he simultaneously be drawn to the breathy tunes of Norma Jean? This isn’t a musical like we’re used to, with the action stopping short for five minutes for a song-and-dance number: this is operatic like Moulin Rouge, little snippets of pop songs, from standards to rap, busting out as needed. And he figures that what sounds like nothing more than squawks to our ears are in fact the most melodious of songs to other penguins. The mystery of how penguins hook up, what attracts them to a mate - and how couples find each other again after months of separation - is what Miller (and his coscreenwriters John Collee, Warren Coleman, and Judy Morris) is concerned with exploring. Because it is all but dispensed with here. In a way that makes me want to say this may be the greatest animated movie ever made.įor a good stretch, the film is brilliant simply just by being Moulin Rouge! meets March of the Penguins as inspired by that Gary Larson cartoon of the penguin yelling “I gotta be me!” It’s gotta be impossible, of course, with the ridiculous lengths of time required to make an animated film, but Feet seems to assume that its audience has seen March and so understands the bizarre mating cycle the penguins go through: the long trek from the sea, the parents sharing egg duty, the huddle to stay warm in the bitter depths of winter, all that stuff. And damned if he doesn’t succeed in that much harder endeavor, too. He has something to say that it is absolutely imperative that we all hear he wants Happy Feet to be Important. But rapidly it becomes clear that Miller is not going to be content for his little dancing-penguin movie to be merely cute. It would have been accomplishment enough for George Miller (the Babe movies) to achieve all-consuming adorableness that manages to remain devoid of an ounce of icky sappiness, which he does: Fluffy baby penguins dancing and singing and waddling around their world with wide-eyed wonder? You have to have a heart of stone not to be a puddle of goo after coming in contact with that. I got that within the first twenty minutes of Happy Feet, and then the film took off into realms of wonderful that I never could have seen coming. There’s just not enough pure unadulterated happy in the world, and I could use some of the moment, so that’s all I needed. The trailer for Happy Feet promised, you know, silly sweet danceable happy, so as long as that promise was fulfilled, I’d have been fine.

Mumble happy feet human