Happy Feet (2006)

Rated PG for just so much innuendo.  We almost shut the movie off in the first few minutes because they kept teasing sex jokes. And poorly, might I add?  There's some scary stuff in the movie because a kids' movie needs just nightmare inducing peril with a dash of existential dread.  Also, one of Robin Williams's voices can be considered offensive.  But I suppose PG is as accurate as I could get with this rating.

DIRECTORS:  George Miller, Warren Coleman, and Judy Morris

George Miller.  The guy who made the Mad Max movies.  This is the other movie he made.  For those thinking that they really wanted to see his Justice League movie, maybe this is telling of what his non Mad Max stuff is like.  Listen, I know that George Miller is an established filmmaker and that I should be giving so much more respect.  But I'm also the family member who stayed and paid attention to the whole mess of a movie.  There are moments where I almost see a movie shining through.  I smell whiffs of good intentions and strong filmmaking.  But then I get overwhelmed with perhaps one of the most annoying kids movies that I have ever seen.

This is a product of its time.  Maybe the 2000s have a hard time defining themselves.  I get real Moulin Rouge knock-off vibes here.  I know the logic of what is going on.  Someone said, "Let's put a bunch of popular songs and have penguins dance to that movie.  Kids like popular songs."  But in terms of really nailing the artistry of these songs, we're not going to do any of that.  As much as I might roll my eyes when it crosses my mind, Moulin Rouge actually has excellent arrangements and covers of songs that we all know and love.  Happy Feet went easy with it.  They just threw the songs in there.  Sure, there's some kind of thematic tie to the movie's messages, but nothing that feels like it would be organic.  Man, this might be a blog about how Moulin Rouge, for its complete fever-dream mentality, actually made the songs feel like they were part of a musical.  That's the thing.  If you didn't know the songs from Moulin Rouge ahead of time, you might think it had the most original and powerful musical songs of all time.

But Happy Feet is a sledgehammer to the face.  Now, enter George Miller, who has to take what must be the most insane script of all time and try to animate it.  That script, it doesn't make a lick of sense, does it?  Kudos for people realizing that this was an opportunity to say something about humanity with this movie, but I think there was this need to have a happy ending.  Unfortunately, I think that there was this need to make the ending happy for a kids's movie.  Let's make this as clear as possible: the movie does not work.  It doesn't make a lick of sense.  It is being pulled in a million directions.  I'm not saying that you can't have multiple conflicts within the story.  That's just movie making.  I'm just saying that there's a split between the central conflict and everything else that's going on in the movie.  Is this movie Footloose?  Is this movie Finding Nemo?  Is it Toy Story?  Is it Moulin Rouge?  What is happening?  For most of the movie, I would tell you that this movie is about winning over Gloria, despite the fact that she's the most desired penguin and that Mumble can't sing.  That seems like the plot.  But then the movie doesn't know what it wants to take on.

When the movie gets a little thin about Mumble's confidence (which kind of comes out of nowhere), the movie becomes this allegory for zealotry.  The Boomer penguins get mad at Mumble for dancing, without really having an explanation about the evils of dancing or a clear religious or moral structure that would justify their actions.  Now, I would have loved this movie.  This is the movie I could watch.  Do you know what?  Even if the movie took the original, 3-trying-to-score-a-10 rom-com plot and mixed it with this religious zealotry plot, I would have been all about it.  But this element of the movie is woefully underbaked.  Mumble becomes this messenger about the greater world, but no one really cares.  Sure, it comes into play as the resolution for the movie, but every character and person in this society had to make a complete character change to make that ending work.  There's no slow development.  It's instantaneous and doesn't make a lick of sense.  Also, this secret cabal of elders who hate dancing is barely part of the story.  They get no attention until Mumble literally starts dancing.  It's also really weird that they hate dancing considering that there are lo-key dance numbers that are tied to the music that the penguins are singing.

But then there's a complete watered down moment of cultural exchange. The most heart-filled part of the movie is when Mumble, the Emperor Penguin, meets the other smaller penguins.  Those smaller penguins, which unabashedly read as hispanic, love to dance and dancing is something more simple.  Now, I would love if that there was a coded message saying that you can dance and love the Lord, given the fact that the smaller penguins seem happier.  But there is no cultural exchange there.  The smaller penguins, when they visit the emperor penguins, barely make a ripple.  It's a nonissue for the movie.  On top of them, the smaller penguins have a weird dynamic that's not really explored to its fullest as well: the interaction between the smaller penguins and Lovelace. No disrespect to Robin Williams, but Lovelace is borderline offensive.  But Lovelace, for some reason, is a macaroni penguin.  Okay, that's not the problem, but Lovelace also distracts from the main plot because he ties into a plot that should be central to the whole story, the effects of environmental negligence.

There's this little tease that the fish have been scant, which leads to the zealotry in the penguin community.  Lovelace, and his brandishing of a soda can ring around his neck, brings Mumble to search for aliens. Boy, is there a disconnect between this story and the rom-com that is supposed to be central to the plot.  Mumble literally has to distance himself from Gloria for the story to exist.  It's meant to be this self-sacrificing moment, but it also a  reminder that the first half of the movie didn't have to exist.  Honestly, this movie just takes a hard right when the story was supposed to be about accepting oneself.  The soda can starts choking Lovelace and then this story becomes about the fish?  (Oh yeah, he's trying to prove that he is allowed to dance because the aliens will bring the fish back.  This stupid movie.)  I'm still not sure how the movie ends up with Mumble and Gloria ending up together.  But I call even bigger shanannigans on the humans letting Mumble go.  There's this belief that the humans would be so interested in a viral video that they would believe that Mumble could get an entire civilization to dance in time?  

Nothing about this movie scans.  It's disjointed.  It's trying to do too much without doing anything right at all.  I know that George Miller is one of those sacrosanct directors, but this movie hurt to watch.  It had some good intentions.  It did.  I recognize that there might be something to be made out of this movie.  But this feels like my kid making me a burrito at Chipotle.  They're trying to put everything in this movie and call it cohesive and the flavors just don't make sense.  Nothing really works in this movie and I'm flummoxed that there was an audience for this, let alone one that found it good.  I'm really skeptical about the reception section on Wikipedia right now when it comes to this movie.