The last few years have seen a spate of animated animal movies. For me, the trend has grown a bit stale; after seeing a few pleasant but somewhat throwaway movies like Madagascar and avoiding a few others like Over the Hedge, I was ready for Hollywood to find something different. Now, after recently seeing Happy Feet, one of the last few trendy animal movies, I’m even more ready.
Happy Feet was advertised as an upbeat movie featuring dancing penguins and plenty of popular music; even the current movie description on the Netflix envelopes sells it as just a pleasant diversion. If you judged the movie based on its own advertising descriptions, you’d think it was just another movie making its living on cute animals and pop culture.
Sadly, that’s not the full story; instead of being a pleasant diversion, Happy Feet is an extraordinarily heavy-handed political movie. To a marginally lesser degree, it is Michael Moore and Al Gore wrapped in cute animation and humor.
The story starts out innocently enough, with a curious civilization in which penguins attract mates by singing catchy songs direct from the top-40 charts. (Oddly enough, sometimes the performances involve backup singers; this leads me to wonder about the marriageability of the backup singers. Do they find other backup singers, or are they lifelong singles? This is never addressed.) When two penguins can’t resist one another’s song, matchmaker matchmaker has made them a match.
But all is not happy in the singing society. In a tragic development, one of the penguins is born with a Fran Drescher singing voice and Michael Flatley feet: his singing could derail a freight train, but his dancing could charm that train right back onto the tracks. And if you don’t believe it, just wait: a song cue is sure to be right around the corner.
This tuxedoed Savion Glover is, of course, born into a society that values its members for their vocal cords, so he is mocked and shunned. Thanks to his consequent separation from that society, he has many adventures and meets new and highly comedic friends, because an animated character without comedic sidekicks might as well not exist at all. He does blah blah blah and learns blah blah blah and eventually manages to blah blah blah. (The blah blah blahs are representative of standard plot points and movie lessons. Also, feel free to insert a few ha ha ha’s for Robin Williams, who produces roughly 97% of the movie’s sparse humor. )
Anyway, this isn’t a movie synopsis site, so let’s get back to the point.
Politically, the first part of the movie is quite innocuous; there is little hint of the skull-cracking baseball bat of a message to be unleashed later. Unfortunately, it’s also fairly boring. It starts a bit slowly, and since most of the humor is produced by characters not introduced until after the waddling Fred Astaire’s societal exodus, it feels even slower. By the time the humor is introduced and the story has escaped the doldrums, the baseball bat has started to gain momentum.
In the grand tradition of Al Gore and The Day After Tomorrow, the movie’s baseball bat is the environment. But surprisingly, it doesn’t even mention global warming. No, this bat is much more specific: it is the food supply of the penguins. It seems the Penguin Idols are running out of fish to eat.
The penguin elders are old crotchety men who stubbornly cling to the belief that some great mystic being is reducing their supply of fish. During his adventures, our hero manages to find a much more reasonable, less mystical explanation for the crisis: aliens are stealing the fish. (Except when he says “aliens,” he means “humans”; he just doesn’t know it.) So, in a noble effort to save the penguins that don’t watch Dancing With The Stars, he sets out not just to prove his theory, but to convince the aliens to stop killing his fellow formal wear.
The last ten or fifteen minutes of the movie are the most heavy-handed scenes of the movie; unsurprisingly, they also are the most absurd. He ends up in a zoo, and his dancing prompts them to let him go so they can follow him to Tuxedo Junction. He convinces his now-sympathetic fellow penguins to dance for the aliens, and the footage of the Penguin of the Dance performance prompts massive worldwide debate, shown as a quick series of black-and-white cut scenes depicting political arguments and large-scale protests. Naturally, it results in a happy ending: the fishing is reduced, and the penguins revel in a wealth of seafood.
Ultimately, my biggest problem with Happy Feet was not that it contained an obvious message, but that it didn’t bother to be up front about its message. The Day After Tomorrow is a heavy-handed message movie, but that’s easy to see without even opening the DVD case; Happy Feet is a heavy-handed message movie wrapped in a thin candy-coated shell, but the marketing focuses on the shell and pays little or no attention to the message. Without a revelation from someone who took the time to discover that defining characteristic of the movie, there’s no warning of the anvil the movie is waiting to drop on its viewers’ heads. That angers me.
And I want my two hours back.
