Happy Feet

Starring: Robin Williams, Hugh Jackman, Elijah Wood, Nicole Kidman, Brittany Murphy Directed by: George Miller Runtime: 98 min. Rated: PG Release date: November 17, 2006 - More Info
READER RATINGS:
5.5 OVERALL	Smart . . . . . . . . 6.5 Sexy . . . . . . . . . 2 Funny . . . . . . . . 5.5

The Nerve Review

Conformity is bad, animated kidflicks repeatedly tell us. Be yourself; flaunt your individuality; Robert Frost took the road less traveled, and it led him to this really hot cocktail waitress whose husband conveniently worked the graveyard shift. A worthy message, perhaps, but rather hard to take seriously when espoused by the most rigidly codified genre in Hollywood. Waddling in the beloved footsteps of March of the Penguins, Happy Feet lugs the Dumbo template all the way to Antarctica, where one newborn chick, Mumble (eventually voiced by Elijah Wood), can't seem to locate his "heartsong," defined here as a musty pop standard that one warbles, karaoke-like, at the object of his/her affection. Instead, Mumble likes to tap dance, and that means that he must leave Japan — sorry, his own flock — and seek acceptance from fellow stubborn misfits. Happy Feet's notion of unorthodoxy, I'm frightened to report, involves Robin Williams as a cholo-accented penguin from the other side of the 'berg.

There was good reason to hope that this paint-by-numbers effort might occasionally wander outside the digital lines, since it's the brainchild of George Miller, whose Babe: Pig in the City ranks among the most demented talking-animal pictures ever made. Apart from a thrillingly kinetic leopard seal attack and a kooky climactic plea for environmental ethics, however, originality and imagination are in dispiritingly short supply. Sadly, animated features don't even offer the pleasure of distinctive voice work anymore — Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman (equally forgettable as Mumble's parents) provide a much better photo-op at the premiere. Still, you can always amuse yourself trying to figure out whether it ever occurred to Miller, or anybody else at Warner Bros., that the sight of a bird with different-colored feathers tapping and grinning his way into people's hearts might have some unfortunate associations. Happy feets, do yo' stuff. — Mike D'Angelo

Other Reviews

Variety
Todd McCarthy
"There is no mistaking Happy Feet as anything but the work of a real filmmaker; in terms of composition, camera movement and editing, the pic is conceived as a 'real' movie, and emerges as one of the very best directed animated films on record."
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Village Voice
Jordan Harper
"And even the wee ones may start to notice something's amiss when the movie's theme goes from 'be yourself' to 'we must regulate the overfishing of the Antarctic oceans.' No, for real."
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Hollywood Reporter
Kirk Honeycutt
"It's not a riotous joke-a-thon like Flushed Away, but for all its serious themes Happy Feet never forgets that, after all, the movie is about dancing penguins."
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Slant
Ed Gonzalez
"George Miller, who hasn't made a movie since the brilliant Babe: Pig and the City, allows the behaviors of emperor penguins in deepest Antarctica to reflect our contemporary political anxieties."
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LA Weekly
Ella Taylor
"The Australian Miller sure knows how to enter the American-individualist mindset, skillfully welding a dare-to-be-different tale of lone bravery to the now obligatory environmentalist agitprop, in which the enemy is us. "
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