Review: Happy Feet
Just to recap: Penguins are cute. Dancing penguins are even cuter. When a movie starts with flightless birds getting down with their bad selves, nobody’s going to care about the rest– plot, character…it’s all secondary to the dancing penguins. Ultimately, this is the problem with Happy Feet: too much extraneous substance.
Happy Feet is frustrating because it lacks focus, or maybe it’s just a case of false advertising. Everything starts out well. There’s some music and a tremendously cute baby penguin who can’t stop tap-dancing on the ice. He can’t sing, but other than that, things are looking up. And then the whole movie swerves off into a plot: family and community rejection, a journey to the aquarium and back, some chase scenes involving a leopard seal and some orcas, and an ecology lesson, all squeezed into ninety minutes or so. There are attempts at emotional seriousness, though none of them are really very effective. None of these are bad things, per se, but…I was promised dancing penguins. What happened to all of the dancing penguins? It all feels like a bit of a cheat, like if I wanted to see a movie about the effect of humans on the food chain, I’d find one for myself. For now, can we just get back to the dancing?
The upside of all of this is that the musical sequences–what we’re really looking for, after all–don’t disappoint. Hugh Jackman and Brittany Murphy lend their voices to classic songs from the last fifty years (curiously, Nicole Kidman also stars but doesn’t do her own singing, not like she couldn’t), and the hordes of penguins tap-dance along. Sometimes the songs are altered in interesting ways or combined with songs from another decade. Those scenes come off as a bit of a love letter to mid-twentieth-century music, the songs everybody knows and the root system of every pop song we hear on the radio today. They’ve got soul.
The upshot: Strange, distracted, and mildly disappointing–not a bad movie, but be aware that only about 20% of the screen time has much to do with singing and/or dancing, and the other 80% has a hard time deciding what it wants to be.
November 27th, 2006 at 9:29 pm
Well, that’s sad. I absolutely love penguins–went to see some the other day and wrote a post in their honor. I wasn’t planning on seeing Happy Feet in the theater, but now I’m not even sure I’ll Netflix it.
November 30th, 2006 at 12:56 am
Well, if you’re really into penguins, you might still like it. It was the lack of dancing that bothered me, mostly. Plenty of penguins, though.