HAPPY FEET

by Kevin Koehler

George Miller has had what you might call a peculiar career arc. He began in movie-making by churning out the subversive ultra-violent actioners Mad Max and their sequels; now, Miller makes subversive children’s entertainment. The first time at the kiddie table, he gave us Babe: Pig in the City, which is basically The City of Lost Children but with talking animals and Holocaust overtones; an incredibly intelligent motion picture, all said, one audiences were not prepared for, so it’s no surprise they whole-heartedly rejected it at the box office (the misleading ad campaign and summer release did no one any favors).

I can’t imagine there were too many financiers lining up to have their money burned a second time. Yet, here we are eight years later with Miller’s latest exercise in anthropomorphization, Happy Feet, the dark tale of one flightless bird’s struggle against cultural orthodoxy and the marine harvesting industry. It opened at number one in the American box office over the heavily-hyped Casino Royale and at the time of this writing has grossed close to $400 million worldwide, demonstrating once and for all the Hollywood proverb that no one knows anything. Especially me.

Emperor penguins sing to attract a mate: it’s true. This is bad news for Mumble (Elijah Wood), a young penguin with a conspicuous lack of “heart song.” Seems everyone can belt one except for him, which may or may not have something to do with being dropped by his Elvis impersonator of a father (Hugh Jackman) when he was just an egg. However, penguin gods giveth and taketh away in equal measure as Mumble is born with the unique, toe-tapping talent to cut a rug. The transformative powers of dance are unfortunately not recognized in the Antarctic’s version of Footloose country; his happy feet are even blamed by the community’s elders for a recent food shortage. “Give praise to the Great Guin, who puts songs in our hearts and fish in our bellies” he is told. “If we are devout, sincere in our praise, the fish will return.” Above all else, the penguins value conformity; if there is no fish, it is for lack of faith (or too many illegal immigrants; who knew penguins were so xenophobic?). “Dissent leads to division and division leads us to doom,” says Noah the Elder (in no way echoing a certain world leader). Mumble refuses to acquiesce to this kind of misology (he blames the fish recession on aliens, thusly discredited as a wild conspiracy theorist) and is banished from the United States of Penguinland.

On his travels, Mumble befriends a merry band of adélie penguins; they speak with conspicuously Mexican accents and are named after a French person, so you can imagine how well they go over with Mumble’s colony (Robin Williams voice acts not one but two roles, giving him an opportunity to speak like a Latino as well as a Southern Pentecostal minister; it’s as hilarious as it sounds, one of the picture’s rare concessions to mass audience appeal). Together, they seek to spread the gospel of dance and uncover the “aliens” abducting all their food: turns out these strange visitors don’t ride in a flying saucer so much as a deep-sea fishing trawler of death.

A bizarre series of events follow, culminating in a bit of piquant brilliance (despite some overt environmentalist soapboxing; Miller’s politicizing is well-intentioned but heavy-handed) involving a zoo aquarium that knowingly mirrors both 2001: A Space Odyssey and the vaudeville of people like Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. The endeavor is steeped in melancholy - one can’t help feel remorse on Miller’s part that animal minstrel shows (albeit computer animated) such as Happy Feet are necessary in the first place. With the sad spectacle of a talking penguin compelled to perform for his survival, we’re left with, well, an inconvenient truth: if only penguins really could entertain us with choreographed dance, humankind wouldn’t over-fish them to the edge of extinction.

Perhaps we’d put them in cages instead.

Interesting footnote: The dancing in the Happy Feet was animated using motion-capture suits on real dancers. Famed tap dancer/choreographer Savion Glover provided the moves for Mumble. Glover notably starred in Spike Lee’s 2000 broadside against contemporary forms of pop culture blackface, Bamboozled.

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