Doin' The Rudolph Shuffle

Happy Feet, written by Warren Coleman, John Collee, George Miller & Judy Morris; directed by George Miller.

Computer technology continues to advance in filmmaking, creating vivid tableaus with a staggering amount of detail. It's unfortunate, then, that the stories beneath the polish are increasingly wispy. In the case of Happy Feet, the latest bid for the family filmgoing box office, it's basically Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer inflated to staggering proportions. Does a simple story of a plucky misfit penguin really need to begin with a cosmic zoom from outer space?

Swooping through hordes of singing waterfowl, the camera focuses on two crooning lovers - Memphis (Hugh Jackman) and Norma Jean (Nicole Kidman) who fall in love, conveniently, during mating season. It's not clear why Elvis and Marilyn are evoked here, beyond the fact that their personalities (as well as their romance) are plug-and-play. Before long, Mama's off to find food, leaving Dad with egg duty. Since most of this is covered more effectively in March Of the Penguins, it's shorthanded here. Even Memphis' accident - he drops his egg, but recovers it before it freezes - evokes little in the way of drama. Happily, it still hatches when the weather breaks, but something is amiss. Little Mumble (as he's later called) taps and shuffles his webbed feet incessantly, to the horror of the others.

We learn that all the singing is critical to cartoon penguins - it's how they express themselves, especially to prospective mates. Not only does this have nothing to do with real penguin behavior, it robs Mumble's quirk of any real contrast. Why is dancing anathema to singing penguins, aside from the fact that it'll dovetail into a love duet with Mumble's childhood friend Gloria later on? Rather than stick with the misfit angle, it turns out that penguins are superstitious - they think Mumble's tapping is affecting the local fish population - it's low, and folks are hungry and worried.

At any rate, the motley bunch of arbitrary ethnicities soon send Mumble out on his own tiny ice floe, just like Rudolph. He then finds new friends in a distant community of Latino penguins, led by feisty, diminutive Ramón (the voice of every secondary character in animation, Robin Williams). Some shtick ensues, and the film then takes a turn into Ferngully: The Last Rainforest territory.

They've all run across evidence that there's more to the region than the local flora and fauna, so they troop off to learn more from the local playboy/guru, Lovelace (also voiced by Williams). He's evasive, but we eventually learn that, yes, Man has entered the forest. A nearby oil refinery is the real culprit, not tap dancing. How can Mumble - netted up for his trouble, and now ensconced in a Sea-World-esque aquarium - convince men not to overfish in the region? Naturally, by the very thing that made him an outcast. We don't really see, though, how his dancing convinced the zoo owners - Mumble simply returns home with a tracking device on his back. Once the trackers spot the entire community desperately tapping in unison, the U.N. lowers the boom, and equilibrium is restored. End on a shot of our happy planet.

Computer penguins can be appealing, but they've got nothing on the real thing. The production is lavish - the cloud work is lovely, the oil refinery is a wealth of rusty patina, and the sense of scale is impressive - but the story has little emotional weight or cohesion, even for a cartoon. The middle section, where Mumble finds his footing with Ramón, is the most entertaining - Ramón and his friends act the most like real penguins, waddling about with their flippers in mid-air, and Mumble towers above his new pals with an endearing gawkiness. The animation positions itself between anthropomorphism and realism, with mixed results. The voice work, aside from Mr. Williams, is mostly marquee value - the leads bring little to the dramatic or musical proceedings.

Happy Feet is a step up from the awkward Babe: A Pig In The City, but it's dispiriting to see George Miller seem so at-odds with filmmaking after the vitality and confidence of his Road Warrior pictures. His prediliction for harsher tones and blunt rhythms seems out of place in children's films (even Lorenzo's Oil suffered from it). There's been a few live-action directors (Miller, Zemeckis, and Besson come to mind) in recent years who seem to have been seduced by the wealth of control animation can offer. Unfortunately, just because you can make a thousand penguins sing and dance, doesn't mean you necessarily should.