Happy Feet: aka The Voiceover Experience

Saw this yesterday. At the risk of sounding terribly glib, facetious, condescending and superior, I will just say: meh.

I was annoyed in the first four seconds when Nicole Kidman's breathy whiny voice started coming out of the mother penguin. She couldn't sing in Moulin Rouge and she cain't sing now, dammit. Hugh Jackman: yes, no one could ever fault him, or his choice in film (except for Kate and Leopold- wasn't that a shocker? Bad move, Hugh) and he is pretty awesome as the father penguin who has a bit of an Elvis thing going. Elijah Wood as the Main Penguin (Mumble): meh. When I think of Elijah Wood it makes me have a sort of double-vision seizure: I think simultaneously of the little nerd in Forever Young who runs around trying to stop a recently-defrosted Mel Gibson from carking it before meeting Jamie Lee Curtis, and hearing Frodo's voice in full freak-out mode screaming "Get off the roooaaad!!" and "Oh, SAAAAM!!" from the scene at the end of the first LOTR when Frodo and Sam are just one wet T-shirt away from full soft-core manporn. So Mumble the penguin had a lot of ...extra meaning for me.

Robin Williams as both the funky Latino penguin and the James Brown preacher penguin was great. I like him, and I had a big crush on him when he was Peter Pan in Hook. But who on earth thought that Brittany Murphy as Mumble's love interest would be a good idea? Lordy. Creepily, Steve Irwin voices one of the elephant seals, as does Tiriel Mora- remember him? He was the hopeless lawyer from The Castle.

So if I stop rabbiting on about the voice casting and talk about the movie itself, then I'll say that the central idea is very timely and very appropriate. Thanks, Al Gore. Penguins have problems because humans are fishing Antartica dry, so loser-turned-hero-penguin swims off to save the universe. He gets captured and kept in Seaworld (one assumes). Life is weird and frustrating until he tap-dances to get the humans' attention, and (this is where you must suspend belief) somehow they interpret this as "I swam all this way to tell you to lay off our fish" and there are a few international fishing conferences, fist-slamming senators, and environmental summits glimpsed through (what else?) a montage (in B&W, no less) and next thing you know, no more fishing, everyone lives happily ever after. Except, one assumes, for the fishermen who make their living this way. Oh well- it's the ANIMALS who are happy, and that's all that matters, right kids?

Meanwhile there's a love story going on, and a backstory about the ancient senior penguins who believe in Mighty Wind Gods and that Mumble's non-traditional sacriligious dancing has caused the fish shortage. They end up with helicopters hurling snow in their faces and being forced to accept that humans both caused, and removed, the fish shortage. I think the audience (the kids, probably) are meant to understand this and think "Ha! Scoff! What a bunch of unenlightened old fools, to think that just because two things occur, there must be a monodirectional link of causality!" I find this concept troubling, and I feel that it promotes a Western-centralised sense of modern infallibility, of total and blinkered reliance on technology, and most of all, a disdain and a reluctance to acknowledge and analyse the cultures of the past, their ways of thinking and of making sense of the world. If I had a child to watch this with, I would be sure to talk with them about the old penguins, and to try to look at some different interpretations. I think even Pocahontas does a better job of valuing the past than this movie, because Disney makes a point of showing us WHY the senior Native Americans hold their beliefs, and HOW their beliefs create stability and balance in their world. The old penguins are just seen as a bunch of naggy, ugly, pontificating, illogical gooseballs. Are kids cluey enough to see a difference? Can they take in the message of the movie, and then form their own (possibly contradictory) opinion?

Ah, so many questions.

Lots of funky dance scenes, though. Stevie Wonder is SO underrated. You'll get mighty sick of R&B by the end, though.

And one more thing: there's a scene where a giant earthmover falls off the ice in a landslide and tumbles to the icy depths. Floating up from the wreckage is a small doll, which Mumble reckons is proof of alien existence. Fair enough. But hang on: does that mean there were people on the earthmover? A child? Did they die? Who the hell would take a child to live on an ice station in Antartica? Nobody cares, because this is a film that values animal rights, youth and modernity, in that order.