Starring: Animation film voiced by Robin Williams, Hugh Jackman, Elijah Wood, Nicole Kidman and Hugo Weaving
Director: George Miller
Rated: G
YES, the director of Happy Feet is the George Miller who made the Mad Max films.
However, he also directed Babe, Pig in the City.
This is his first film since Babe. It is a cheerful show with an ecological message.
It is also another of 2006’s several animated films featuring the animal world, this one with an appeal to children and adults.
The characters are mainly penguins.
It is fortunate for Happy Feet that so many of its audiences will have delighted in The March of the Penguins and will feel very much at home in this penguin world, remembering the mating, the long winter march, the hatching of the eggs, the family reunions, the threats of the sea leopards …
The animation is bright and breezy, the camera continually on the move, the screenplay full of songs and quite a lot of happy feet tap dancing.
The dancing is all due to Mumble (Elijah Wood moving from Hobbit to Penguin), who fell on his head while in the egg, and who finds he cannot sing like all the other emperor penguins, especially his friend, Gloria (Brittany Murphy).
Mum and Dad can sing because they are modelled on Marilyn Monroe and Elvis.
Nicole Kidman voices (and sings) Mum and Hugh Jackman does an Elvis voice impersonation as Dad.
In fact, the voice cast is top notch.
Robin Williams goes zany again as Ramon, a Latino fairy penguin with attitude, as well as Lovelace who has set himself up as something of a guru for the fairy penguins.
Williams has plenty of opportunity to be manic, enjoyably so.
Hugo Weaving has a Scots accent as the penguin elder who is conservative, resists change and exiles poor Mumble.
Anthony LaPaglia is the chief of the predatory birds. Magda Szubanski is the singing teacher and Miriam Margoyles the penguin diva.
There are other predators as well as some menacing sea leopards (among whose voices we find Steve Irwin).
While the film goes back over the routines of the penguins in winter and summer and introduces the theme of their singing, there is also the theme of the lack of fish for sustenance, the sea leopards and the whales and Mumble’s discovery that the aliens in their fishing boats are depleting the waters.
But Mumble’s main talent, since he can’t sing, is that he’s got rhythm. And it manifests itself in his happy feet.
The feet movement, the tap dancing rhythms and the music are quite infectious. You want to dance and prove that you have happy feet.
It all comes together at the end – the humans taking note of ecological needs, the penguins surviving – and all of them dancing.
