Did anybody see this year's Best Animated Feature, Happy Feet? It was the inflight movie on my return trip from SCMS. It's kind of like a cross between Dumbo and Bambi: part self-esteem melodrama, part ecological fantasy. It also adds a healthy dollop of exaggerated multiculturalism: the emperor penguins have to "find their songs" with which to attract mates, and these songs range from Elvis Presley to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five (I fairly boggled at the image of a pudgy penguin rapping "Don't push me/'Cuz I'm close to the edge"), the stodgy older emperors all speak with thick Scottish brogues, and the adelie penguins are all Latin American (the leader of whom is portrayed by that well-known Buenos Aires native, Robin Williams). All of the human characters are played by live actors. And has anyone had an odder career path than George Miller, who began his career with the violent apocalyptic revenge Mad Max films, before moving to Hollywood for Witches of Eastwick and Lorenzo's Oil before becoming a children's film director with Babe?
I don't know if I'd say I liked it, but it's definitely worth pointing out.
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4 comments:
I took Mia to see it. I saw more Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer in it than Dumbo or Bambi.
I also noted the abundance of racial stereotypes. Dana Stevens wrote something about it on Slate. Can't remember if it was any good.
Having a full brood of kids, I've become somewhat of a connoisseur of the kid movie. I see more kid movies in the theater than any other kind. And I have to say, Happy Feet left me feeling the oddest of any kid movie before (not a hard feat, but still...). The part that bugs me, other than the need for every character to play a racial stereotype, is the heavy handed, and somewhat brutal, environmental message.
I realize that the earth is in big trouble and it is humanity's fault. However, I don't think it is appropriate to lay this on children. Hey kids, those zoos you so love, they drive the penguins insane! Those fish sticks? Every time you eat one a penguin starves!
This doesn't really put the finger on the exact nature of the oddness of the movie, but I'm not going to watch it a second time to try to figure it out.
It is a rather hardcore environmental message, though interestingly, it is a child who sets in motion Mumble's victory. And maybe this is because I'm not a parent, but I say its never too young to educate the kids in the ways of being green. The environmental message didn't strike me as being too heavy handed, either, though that may be because the movie had weirded me out enough that I was willing to accept anything by that point.
Rudolph also occurred to me as a referent for HF, but I listed Dumbo because, as with Bambi, it's a Disney film. And Bambi's environmentalism -- nature as paradise threatened by humans, in this case hunters -- is fairly well known. He might have been a rat bastard in many cases, but Walter Elias apparently had some fairly progressive ideas of how humans should behave in the world (cf. his belief in compact cities dominated by clean, affordable public transportation).
BTW --
"Those fish sticks? Every time you eat one a penguin starves!"
-- nearly made me choke on my breakfast.
I don't have a problem with educating children in the necessity of being green, but that wasn't what the movie offered. It offered truly frightening images of an abandoned whaling yard (with nasty looking blades for torturing whales); a penguin being rudely pulled from a fishnet with a sharp hook; and a penguin driven insane by being confined in a zoo.
I may be projecting other problems I have with the way we as a society expose children to societal ills. Mia started getting anti-drug information in kindergarten and is constantly bombarded with messages that the world is ecologically doomed. I wonder if the threat of nuclear war that I grew up under has simply been changed to the threat of an environmental holocaust.
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