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Happy Feet: for some reason I need to write a review
It's been months and months since I saw the movie, but I always meant to write something about it. What finally forced me to stop putting it off was the third-to-last sentence in Cradle to Cradle (see previous entry for the full book report): "What would it mean to become, once again, native to this place, the Earth--the home of all our relations?" To some extent, Happy Feet shares McDonough and Braungart's pessimistic view that all our unnatural technology has made humanity alien to its own world.
But that theme doesn't edge its way into the movie until after the opening act, so let's start with first impressions: the filmmakers seemed determined to introduce us to the world of the Antarctic by recreating the highlights of the documentary March of the Penguins in CG. Intriguingly, the entire visual style of the film follows from this initial documentary realism: talking animals in animated films are usually anthropomorphic caricatures, but here they are photorealistic down to the last detail, with the exception of more flexible beaks or jaws and more expressive eyes. This seems oddly appropriate to a film whose characters refer to humans as "aliens."
The method imposes some limitations on the filmmakers. Like Bambi, the birds and marine mammals in Happy Feet have no hands, which means that their exaggerated intelligence can't be matched by a full range of humanlike activities. But that's okay because, as you'll recall from the trailers, the film's focus is squarely on voices and, well, feet.
And this is where the filmmakers don't go nearly far enough. By itself, I would accept the conceit of symbolizing the real Emperor Penguin pair-bonding ritual, in which mates* can identify each other's calls amid a sea of thousands, by letting the animated characters sing like humans. But if humans are barely-heard-of alien creatures from beyond the edges of the known world, then why do the penguins' "heart songs" turn out to be well-known American pop songs? Even this could be almost reasonable if not for one scene in which the characters actually rattle off the names of the singers! And in two other painful scenes, the main character, Mumble, is ridiculed for his tone-deafness because when he tries to sing, what comes out is the actual cry of the Emperor Penguin, a two-tone descending call that has its own haunting beauty.
After the filmmakers have exhausted the potential of their main, crowd-pleasing premise (singing and tap-dancing penguins could only fill the space of a music video, not a motion picture), they find themselves an environmentalist purpose. Mumble, played by Elijah Wood, gets to go off on a quest to save his world from destruction--specifically, from the danger of running out of fish to eat. Apparently, the fishing fleets of the world have descended on the Antarctic Ocean and, as usual, have brought the area's fishable species to the brink of collapse. (In real life, this and other threats have not been sufficient to move the Emperors even one notch down the ladder toward endangerment, though Wikipedia says this may change soon.)
So instead of tossing a magic ring into a volcano, Mumble has to win the hearts and minds of the "aliens" by--bizarrely--breaching the boundaries between the symbolic and the realistic that the filmmakers have set up. He teaches his colony to tap-dance, and they do it while humans are watching. This nonsensical display turns the real-looking penguins into nothing more than CG mascots advertising their own survival, proving once again that in Hollywood's opinion, getting people to respect and cherish nature for its own sake is a lost cause.
* Contrary to the movie's heavy implications (the use of the phrase "soul mates," etc.), Emperor Penguins do not mate for life. Each pairing lasts only a year.
But that theme doesn't edge its way into the movie until after the opening act, so let's start with first impressions: the filmmakers seemed determined to introduce us to the world of the Antarctic by recreating the highlights of the documentary March of the Penguins in CG. Intriguingly, the entire visual style of the film follows from this initial documentary realism: talking animals in animated films are usually anthropomorphic caricatures, but here they are photorealistic down to the last detail, with the exception of more flexible beaks or jaws and more expressive eyes. This seems oddly appropriate to a film whose characters refer to humans as "aliens."
The method imposes some limitations on the filmmakers. Like Bambi, the birds and marine mammals in Happy Feet have no hands, which means that their exaggerated intelligence can't be matched by a full range of humanlike activities. But that's okay because, as you'll recall from the trailers, the film's focus is squarely on voices and, well, feet.
And this is where the filmmakers don't go nearly far enough. By itself, I would accept the conceit of symbolizing the real Emperor Penguin pair-bonding ritual, in which mates* can identify each other's calls amid a sea of thousands, by letting the animated characters sing like humans. But if humans are barely-heard-of alien creatures from beyond the edges of the known world, then why do the penguins' "heart songs" turn out to be well-known American pop songs? Even this could be almost reasonable if not for one scene in which the characters actually rattle off the names of the singers! And in two other painful scenes, the main character, Mumble, is ridiculed for his tone-deafness because when he tries to sing, what comes out is the actual cry of the Emperor Penguin, a two-tone descending call that has its own haunting beauty.
After the filmmakers have exhausted the potential of their main, crowd-pleasing premise (singing and tap-dancing penguins could only fill the space of a music video, not a motion picture), they find themselves an environmentalist purpose. Mumble, played by Elijah Wood, gets to go off on a quest to save his world from destruction--specifically, from the danger of running out of fish to eat. Apparently, the fishing fleets of the world have descended on the Antarctic Ocean and, as usual, have brought the area's fishable species to the brink of collapse. (In real life, this and other threats have not been sufficient to move the Emperors even one notch down the ladder toward endangerment, though Wikipedia says this may change soon.)
So instead of tossing a magic ring into a volcano, Mumble has to win the hearts and minds of the "aliens" by--bizarrely--breaching the boundaries between the symbolic and the realistic that the filmmakers have set up. He teaches his colony to tap-dance, and they do it while humans are watching. This nonsensical display turns the real-looking penguins into nothing more than CG mascots advertising their own survival, proving once again that in Hollywood's opinion, getting people to respect and cherish nature for its own sake is a lost cause.
* Contrary to the movie's heavy implications (the use of the phrase "soul mates," etc.), Emperor Penguins do not mate for life. Each pairing lasts only a year.