"Happy Feet": Bye, bye birdie
All right already, enough with the penguins.
There was "March of the Penguins," followed by comedian Bob Saget's straight-to-video parody "Farce of the Penguins." There's the ubiquitous, interactive Web site for kids, "Club Penguin." There was the funny cell of paranoid penguins in "Madagascar." There was Penguin MC in "The Wild." There was David Attenborough's amazing BBC series, "Life in the Freezer." I'm getting frostbite just thinking about it.
Let's call the penguin thing off with the computer-animated "Happy Feet," an ambitious, sporadically intriguing, occasionally hilarious but weird pastiche of grab-bag references to pop-culture history. Plus an environmental theme as hot as last week's controversial headline about how the world could run out of seafood in a couple of decades. About which I'm bummed.
"Happy Feet" is about a misfit and oddly named penguin, Mumble (voiced by Elijah Wood), who actually speaks quite clearly but can't sing his "heartsong" to attract a mate like the other penguins. He can, however, dance like a fool, or, more precisely, tap like Savion Glover, whose movements were captured by computer to instill an amazing tap form into Mumble's steps.
Being different, Mumble is singled out by penguin elders. They draw a spurious connection between his influence on other young penguins and the fact that fish seem to be disappearing from the ocean, creating a famine.
Out he goes, only to make friends with smaller, Hispanic penguins from some kind of Antarctic barrio, led by Ramón (Robin Williams, who also voices two other characters). Ramón is an exceptionally funny fellow who accompanies Mumble on a mission to stop the "aliens" (that would be we humans) from overfishing the oceans.
None of this ever quite turns into a story that makes good, organic sense. The major problem is the film's hyperactive riffing on a million pop touchstones, kind of like being inside Robin Williams' mind during an improvisation but not as interesting. Blame George Miller, the Australian filmmaker who made far more interesting and congruent movies like "The Road Warrior" and "Babe."
Mumble's father (Hugh Jackman) sounds vaguely like Elvis, while his mother (Nicole Kidman) has a Marilyn Monroe thing going on. Together they seem to be leading the penguin cast through a nostalgic musical about crusty old authorities repressing the hip kids in a 1950s dead-end town.
But all of that is tucked inside layers and layers of random, sentimental nods to movies and songs and dance styles and characters of yesteryear, occasionally offset by more recent clichés. The film isn't helped by a sudden veering toward topical seriousness about depleted fish supplies, or an ending that looks lazy in conception and suddenly arrives with story beats missing.
Tom Keogh: tomwkeogh@yahoo.com
"Happy Feet," with the voices of Robin Williams, Elijah Wood, Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman. Directed by George Miller, from a screenplay by Miller, Warren Coleman, Judy Morris and John Collee. 98 minutes. Rated PG for some mild peril and rude humor. Several theaters; also showing in IMAX 3-D at the Pacific Science Center.