Happy Feet

Boy, did I hate this movie. I really hated it, with the same hate that I have for thieves, for the guys that got away with killing JFK (I mean if there WERE other guys that killed JFK), and as for the taste of beets! To be fair, there are parts of the movie that work. Robin Williams is great in this movie, hysterical. The animation is well done. I am sure you have already seen the commercials and know that the movie has to do with a dancing penguin. It was directed by George Miller (who directed the Mad Max series), and he also was one of the producers of Happy Feet. Miller's last big project was Babe: Pig in the City and Happy Feet has a lot in common with that movie. It is also odd that they did a 3D trailer for this movie that was shown in the IMAX theaters, but when the movie is shown in the IMAX version, it is not in 3D.

The reason I hated this movie is because the way it uses music. If you have already seen Moulin Rouge then you will know where I am going to this. Music is an often underappreciated component of a movie. I loved the score to American Beauty, by Thomas Newman. It added a lot of atmosphere to the movie. I am not talking about the songs that were in the movie but the original score that was composed specifically for that movie. To be fair American Beauty does make use of the oldies, but it doesn't dominate the movie like it does in Happy Feet or Moulin Rougue and the songs that were picked in American Beauty fit their characters and were used to show who the characters are (and when the oldies are used we know where the music is coming from, for example the radio or for dinner music). Moulin Rouge took a lot of songs, "Your Song" by Elton John, and would force it together with "Silly Love Songs" by Paul McCartney, and it just doesn't work. It doesn't work. And it doesn't work in Happy Feet either. It totally destroys the mood of the movie. Having penguins sing Grandmaster Flash's "The Message" might have seemed to be a clever idea one day, but that day has long since passed. They have two seconds of one song here, two seconds of one song there, and it just sucks. It does nothing make the movie a pleasurable experience. I kept asking myself "Haven't these guys seen Dumbo", which has a wonderful score. I am sure that I am more sensitive to this than most people are, but that is how I reacted to the movie. I hated how this movie used music. The music doesn't grow out of the story. They use the music to make the mood, and it is done without any nuance or taste, just thrown out there to give them something to sing or dance to. It rides on the coattails of the feeling that hearing "The Message" brings to you. The movie coasts on the good feeling these little snatches of music will bring to you, instead of the doing the work that a good score has to do to establish a specific mood. It cheats, and it does it all the way through the movie. Sometimes I don't like "Family Guy" for the same reason, where they do film parodies, just to throw in a film parody, without really pushing the story in any way. I understand that the penguins have to have something to dance to, and they should have done their homework and figured this problem out instead of getting Grandmaster Flash to do it for them, or integrated the music more into the story. Why a penguin is singing "The Message", is a question we are not supposed to ask. It isn't cute. It made me want to hurl, really far.

The penguins are depicted in a fairly realistic fashion, which is another reason I didn't really like this movie. If you are going to make a cartoon, then make a cartoon. Why make totally realistic penguins if you are making a cartoon? This part did not bother me as much because they do go to the trouble to show you different kind of penguins which does spice it up a little. The voices that were chosen didn't really make much of an impression one way or the other. The whole movie is a bowl of different ideas, dancing penguins, has a little ecology thrown in, some science facts for fun, and it just doesn't jell. The one exception is anytime Robin Williams is on the screen. He is one damn funny penguin. I say skip it unless you are Robin Williams fan. I heard one reviewer on NPR suggest this should be nominated for best picture. Please say it ain't so. My vote would be for The Departed or Flag of Our Fathers at this point, but not this mess of a movie. If you have younger kids you might want to check this out. They will like it, and most of the issues I had with the movie will fly right over their heads and in the meantime you can look forward to the parts of the movie that have Robin Williams in them and sleep through the rest.

You can write James Harper at movielover77061@yahoo.com