Post by Hucklebubba on Jan 13, 2007 23:51:54 GMT -5
(Warning: In this review, parts of my body talk to me.)
I must confess, I was not fantastically enthusiastic about going to see Happy Feet.
For one thing, movie theaters not only make it onto my vast, Santa Clausian list of places where I feel uneasy, but they rank pretty close to the top.
For another, I just couldn't get all that jazzed over the prospect of watching penguins dance for two-and-a-half hours (more on the running time in a moment). CGI is meant for seafood pirates, giant octopi, and talking cars, says I.
Nonetheless, I succumbed to my fate yesterday, and had my presumptions pleasantly obliterated. Which is a rare thing. Most obliterations aren't especially pleasant.
And now, the obligatory plot synopsis: Happy Feet details the travails of one Mumble Happyfeet, an appropriately hobbity-named little penguin voiced by Frodo himself. The audience rides along as Mumble grows from a tiny fuzzball into a somewhat larger fuzzball, gets ostracized from his friends and family by the penguin pharisees, falls in with some jovial Mexican penguins and their televangelist leader, reminds us all that penguins are within spitting distance of the bottom of the food chain by getting attacked by pretty much every predator there is, and ultimately saves all of Antarctica with his tap-dancing skills.
And now you no longer have any reason to see the movie.
But, if you decide to disregard my quasi-spoiling and see it anyway, I think you'll find there's a lot to like.
Naturally, in a movie like this, the soundtrack is going to be of utmost importance, and in this case it works for me exactly 85.2% of the time. Which isn't bad at all. The lacking 14.8% is due to a couple of hip-hop pieces that felt kind of iffy--likely just a matter of personal preference--but overall, I approve greatly. I'm particular fond of the part when the little Mexican penguins team up for a couple of bars of Chicago's "If You Leave Me Now." It's brief and not especially important, but well executed nonetheless.
The characters are not what I would call super-memorable, or anything we haven't seen a million times before--The Outcast Hero, The Goofy Friends, The Sympathetic Love Interest; the gang's all here--but they get the job done.
My highest point of recommendation for Happy Feet, however, requires a bit of prefacing. Which is something I'm over-fond of doing anyway, so, huzzah.
Know ye this, and tremble: There are pronounced environmentalist undertones present, and Robin Williams provides some of the voice talent. If you grew up in the nineties, that combination should be more than enough to make you undo the snap on your holster. And if I had known ahead of time that there was tree-huggery on the horizon, I may well have taken a pass and tested the incredibly slim possiblity that Rocky Balboa might not suck like a black hole.
But we would've both been wrong. Heck, I probably would've been wrong twice. Never in all of my years of having environmentalist media tell me what absolute swine I am, have I seen this positive a portrayal of humanity.
Yes, the movie's driving crisis is that fish are becoming scarce, and yes, it's made evident fairly early on that the mean ol' humans are behind it, and yes there's a part where some elephant seals make mention of "the Annihilators," breifly causing my eyes to say, "We wish to roll, master! Forbid us no longer!"
But once Mumble uses his fancy moves to communicate Antarctica's crisis (just go with it), their response is almost unrealistically. . .something. Considerate? Decent?
All I know is that there's a segment of debate over food chain disruption, wherein the vast majority of those involved suggest a total cessation of Antarctic harvesting, and exactly one guy says, "They're just a bunch of flightless birds at the bottom of the world!" He is promptly taken outside and set on fire. And then the whalers and fishing vessels withdraw with a swiftness belied by their size, and in less than a minute, the whole world is happy again. This will, unfortunately, be seen in retrospect as a bad decision in 2317 when penguins overrun the planet.
The gist seems to be that the evil hu-mans were actually merely ignorant, and not insatiably greedy demonspawn, as is the popular depiction.
This was a whole new world for me. Right up until the end, when the human expedition team flies in on the chopper, I fully expected them to at least land right on the penguins, and, like as not, set up some heavy machineguns and mortar emplacements and commence with the meaningless slaughter, harvesting only the beaks and burning the rest. Because I guess I was just under the impression that that's what we do.
But no. The penguins dance for them, and the humans dance too, and a grand time is had by all. I'm still trying to wrap my brain around it. Years of conditioning cannot be lightly discarded.
But enough about actual content, let's go back to the part about the runtime.
See, somebody told me that Happy Feet was two-and-a-half hours long--luckily for them, I can't remember for sure who it was--and this almost caused a crisis of sorts. Because, at about 1:45 in, as is the case with every movie, regardless of the fact that I may have just come in from a waterless four day trek through the desert, I started receiving distress calls from Bladder Control.
"She cannae hold together cap'n! She's goin' ta blow!"
To which I responded:
"Okay, I'm going to assume that you're just being naval, and that I do not actually have a female bladder."
But, the movie actually ends at just shy of two hours, which means I did not end up having to urinate on myself and possibly the young couple in the next row. And any day that I can say that is a good one.
I must confess, I was not fantastically enthusiastic about going to see Happy Feet.
For one thing, movie theaters not only make it onto my vast, Santa Clausian list of places where I feel uneasy, but they rank pretty close to the top.
For another, I just couldn't get all that jazzed over the prospect of watching penguins dance for two-and-a-half hours (more on the running time in a moment). CGI is meant for seafood pirates, giant octopi, and talking cars, says I.
Nonetheless, I succumbed to my fate yesterday, and had my presumptions pleasantly obliterated. Which is a rare thing. Most obliterations aren't especially pleasant.
And now, the obligatory plot synopsis: Happy Feet details the travails of one Mumble Happyfeet, an appropriately hobbity-named little penguin voiced by Frodo himself. The audience rides along as Mumble grows from a tiny fuzzball into a somewhat larger fuzzball, gets ostracized from his friends and family by the penguin pharisees, falls in with some jovial Mexican penguins and their televangelist leader, reminds us all that penguins are within spitting distance of the bottom of the food chain by getting attacked by pretty much every predator there is, and ultimately saves all of Antarctica with his tap-dancing skills.
And now you no longer have any reason to see the movie.
But, if you decide to disregard my quasi-spoiling and see it anyway, I think you'll find there's a lot to like.
Naturally, in a movie like this, the soundtrack is going to be of utmost importance, and in this case it works for me exactly 85.2% of the time. Which isn't bad at all. The lacking 14.8% is due to a couple of hip-hop pieces that felt kind of iffy--likely just a matter of personal preference--but overall, I approve greatly. I'm particular fond of the part when the little Mexican penguins team up for a couple of bars of Chicago's "If You Leave Me Now." It's brief and not especially important, but well executed nonetheless.
The characters are not what I would call super-memorable, or anything we haven't seen a million times before--The Outcast Hero, The Goofy Friends, The Sympathetic Love Interest; the gang's all here--but they get the job done.
My highest point of recommendation for Happy Feet, however, requires a bit of prefacing. Which is something I'm over-fond of doing anyway, so, huzzah.
Know ye this, and tremble: There are pronounced environmentalist undertones present, and Robin Williams provides some of the voice talent. If you grew up in the nineties, that combination should be more than enough to make you undo the snap on your holster. And if I had known ahead of time that there was tree-huggery on the horizon, I may well have taken a pass and tested the incredibly slim possiblity that Rocky Balboa might not suck like a black hole.
But we would've both been wrong. Heck, I probably would've been wrong twice. Never in all of my years of having environmentalist media tell me what absolute swine I am, have I seen this positive a portrayal of humanity.
Yes, the movie's driving crisis is that fish are becoming scarce, and yes, it's made evident fairly early on that the mean ol' humans are behind it, and yes there's a part where some elephant seals make mention of "the Annihilators," breifly causing my eyes to say, "We wish to roll, master! Forbid us no longer!"
But once Mumble uses his fancy moves to communicate Antarctica's crisis (just go with it), their response is almost unrealistically. . .something. Considerate? Decent?
All I know is that there's a segment of debate over food chain disruption, wherein the vast majority of those involved suggest a total cessation of Antarctic harvesting, and exactly one guy says, "They're just a bunch of flightless birds at the bottom of the world!" He is promptly taken outside and set on fire. And then the whalers and fishing vessels withdraw with a swiftness belied by their size, and in less than a minute, the whole world is happy again. This will, unfortunately, be seen in retrospect as a bad decision in 2317 when penguins overrun the planet.
The gist seems to be that the evil hu-mans were actually merely ignorant, and not insatiably greedy demonspawn, as is the popular depiction.
This was a whole new world for me. Right up until the end, when the human expedition team flies in on the chopper, I fully expected them to at least land right on the penguins, and, like as not, set up some heavy machineguns and mortar emplacements and commence with the meaningless slaughter, harvesting only the beaks and burning the rest. Because I guess I was just under the impression that that's what we do.
But no. The penguins dance for them, and the humans dance too, and a grand time is had by all. I'm still trying to wrap my brain around it. Years of conditioning cannot be lightly discarded.
But enough about actual content, let's go back to the part about the runtime.
See, somebody told me that Happy Feet was two-and-a-half hours long--luckily for them, I can't remember for sure who it was--and this almost caused a crisis of sorts. Because, at about 1:45 in, as is the case with every movie, regardless of the fact that I may have just come in from a waterless four day trek through the desert, I started receiving distress calls from Bladder Control.
"She cannae hold together cap'n! She's goin' ta blow!"
To which I responded:
"Okay, I'm going to assume that you're just being naval, and that I do not actually have a female bladder."
But, the movie actually ends at just shy of two hours, which means I did not end up having to urinate on myself and possibly the young couple in the next row. And any day that I can say that is a good one.
