Happy Feet: A Big Steaming Pile of Gentoo Guano

Let me be blunt: Happy Feet may well be the worst children's movie ever made.

I had the misfortune of sitting through this ghastly flick this weekend; we took Lucas, thinking that he'd love a movie about a tap-dancing penguin. And I believe he would have enjoyed a movie about a tap-dancing penguin, had Happy Feet been such a movie. Before I go any further, two things to keep in mind. One, this review contains spoilers. Two, regular readers will know me as a left-leaning-blue state pinko commie hippie progressive who had Happy Feet himself during the recent midterms. This will become important when I get to the chief reason for my Weddell Sea-deep, Mount Erebus-cold hatred of this flick. This is the movie that Ted Rall might have written had he decided to pen a Moulin Rouge ripoff featuring singing penguins.

Where to begin? First, the actors. I'm thinking that Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman believed that they were doing a voiceover for Yu-Gi-Oh: The Musical; their overacting (overvoicing?) is on par with the best of the awful dubbing that Japanese anime receives. Elijah Wood sounds stoned (and more power to him if he was; I couldn't have recorded that shit without a few hits of The Kind to keep it in perspective). Brittany Murphy sounds like Brittany Murphy. (Plus the penguin she voices has boobs! Tig Ol' Penguin Bitties!) And let me ask - does anyone still find Robin Williams funny? A side note: as I said earlier, the film rips off Moulin Rouge, with it's soundtrack of mashup pop tunes.

Then there's the plot. Happy Feet is about a tap-dancing penguin, right? Well, it is for about the first 20 minutes of the movie. Then there's some stuff about all of the penguins' fish supply disappearing, and Happy Feet the penguin leaves for some reason, I think to find out why the fish are vanishing, and then he ends up at Sea World. Something like that.

My chief issue with the movie, though, is the fact that (again, leftie talking here!) it's a thinly veiled, ham-handed liberal propaganda screed. Happy Feet the penguin is ostracized by the Penguin Elders because he goes against the teachings of the Penguin God. (Religion bad!) Happy Feet's devout father is ashamed of him because he likes to dance (I think there might have been some sort of subtle real-world parallel symbolism going on there, but I'm not sure what they were driving at. Oh! Wait! Dancing penguin = gay people! Clever!) Humans, it turns out, are the real bad guys of the story - they've apparently taken all of the fish, and worse, they throw Happy Feet into Sea World, where he slowly goes mad. (This PC sensibility apparently does not extend to the movie's skuas and killer whales; they eat penguins, hence, they're evil.) There are ways to get messages across in kid's films - half-assed, half-witted movies like this only prove to show how much better the Pixar crew is at delivering sharp and entertaining movies that don't insult the intelligence of the audience.

But what do I know? I'm a grownup. I'm pretty sure we won't be buying Lucas the DVD. We spent the bulk of the movie chasing him around the theater, because he realized that the fossilized Good 'N Plentys and stale popcorn in the aisles was much more interesting than the dreck up on the screen.