Chick flick
Deborah Ross
Happy Feet U, nationwide
This film has been a big hit in America and for the life of me I can’t understand why. Am I completely out of step? Am I a misery guts? Am I both completely out of step and a misery guts, in which case: is this why I don’t get invited anywhere any more? Do people say, ‘Oh no, I don’t want that out-of-step misery guts round here’? I have tried to ask around, but everyone I tried was out even when they were in and I could see them moving in that wibbly-wobbly way behind the frosted glass of their front doors. How do you account for that? Sure beats me.
Look, this movie has a few good things going for it, and it’s only fair to say so. The animation is terrific and, on occasion, breathtakingly so. The penguins are well cute. The penguin chicks are even cuter. But the story is so banal and corny and depressingly familiar — yet another reworking of the ugly duckling, in essence — it all quickly becomes tiresome. And boring. And it’s much too long. And there’s a laughably preachy eco-message bolted on at the end that doesn’t gel with the rest of the film. But mostly it’s just boring. I confess: I did have a ten-minute doze somewhere in the middle, between the seal chase and the whale chase. Very unprofessional, I know, but given the choice between being unprofessional and knocking ten minutes from the 183 minutes of this movie’s running time, I think I know which I’d choose again.
I’ve no idea about the genesis of this movie but imagine someone looked at the astounding success of March of the Penguins — one of the most successful documentaries of all time — and thought, ‘I know, let’s do it with animation. And disco! And R&B!’ Fair enough. Nothing against that. Nothing against March of the Penguins either, although I’m not sure I even got all that hoo-ha. It seemed no better than most wildlife documentaries and certainly no better than an episode of Planet Earth. And it was so hideously sentimental, too. ‘This poor penguin will never waken again ... ’ I think you’ll find that’s because it’s dead. ‘This little penguin will sleep the sweet kind of sleep that will be its last sleep ... ’ I think you’ll find that’s also BECAUSE IT IS DEAD! We do know about death, you know. It happens when life stops. Why can’t you say ‘dead’? Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. There, done it for you. Not so bad, was it? GROW UP! GET REAL! I think I might be very out of step indeed.
Here, our hero Mumble (voiced by Elijah Wood) is an Emperor penguin chick who can tap-dance wonderfully but cannot sing. His mum (Nicole Kidman) and dad (Hugh Jackman) don’t know what to make of him except that ‘it just ain’t penguin’ and how is he ever going to find true love? You need a ‘heartsong’ — performed in this film as modern pop songs — to find a mate. Anyway, to cut a long story short, for which you should be very grateful — I only really dozed on your behalf — Mumble is cast out of the colony and, accompanied by a group of Mexican mini-penguins (two of which are voiced by Robin Williams, which may be two too many for some people), he sets out to discover why there is a fish shortage and if there is ‘any place where a penguin without a heartsong can truly belong’. Honestly, this script makes the March of the Penguins narration look brutal.
OK, the best animated films of the past few years, like Toy Story and Shrek, have pretty familiar narratives, too, but at least they came with great gags, great characterisations, great cliché-free scripts and an attitude that didn’t patronise anyone: the kids or the adults. But this film is woefully patronising with an ‘embrace our differences’ message that simply makes you want to throw. Plus, there are so many subplots the film never coheres as a whole. There’s the heroic outsider story, the quest caper, a love story, a father-son story, a friendship story and then, suddenly, at the end, it ditches all the above stories and goes full out for a ‘we must regulate fishing in the Antarctic oceans’ story. It’s a mess. The accents are all over the place. There’s British and Scottish and American and South American and Australian and Italian without any explanation whatsoever. The magic of the animation is wasted, thrown away. They should have simply gone for a cute chick flick and left it at that. The tag line on the posters says, ‘May cause toe-tapping.’ It didn’t for me. But then I am an out-of-step misery guts. Go and ask anyone. They might even be ‘in’ for you.
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