Happy Feet

Directed by George Miller

Most recent animated films, from Finding Nemo to Cars, offer the same formulaic storyline and the same childish, cute-animal moralizing. But George Miller’s Happy Feet, set among Antarctica’s Emperor Penguin colony, has a visionary quality that turns formula into allegory. Miller, who directed the Mad Max trilogy and the Babe films—proving himself a master of kinetics and fantasy—uses the screen for vast, deep imagining. The wide ice-and-snow terrains and limitless blue skyscapes may be digitally-produced technological marvels, but they also inspire contemplation—about environment, existence and, for any thinking adults, human nature.

Happy Feet tells how one young penguin, Mumbles (voiced by Elijah Wood), differs from the others. He can’t produce the usual mating call, but his feelings come out through his feet. Mumbles’ waddle develops into tap-dancing syncopation. He glides over the tundras and out into the larger world where “aliens” (humans) come to explore.

 Mumbles’ story of risk and individuality suggests a permissive attitude similar to the themes of most animated films produced since the Disney studio’s recent multicultural, politically-correct and profitable edict. But Miller doesn’t emphasize the typical family-movie homilies. His hyperkinetic sensibility is exceptional. Happy Feet is about spectacle and sensory experience; its sophistication goes beyond Mother Goose.

Instead of repeating the charm of Babe, Miller uses anthropomorphism almost spookily: Mumbles has fuzzy gray and black feathers, blue eyes and a gold beak. His oddly intimate, pet-like features fit the film’s idiosyncratic musical awareness. Happy Feet is about the influence of pop music as an expression of personal emotion ouching on pop’s controversial challenge, to cultural authority. The penguins sing a repertoire that includes the Beatles, Prince, the Beach Boys and Stevie Wonder. It resembles a Moulin Rouge smash-up but with animals it becomes abstract, avoiding Baz Luhrmann’s disastrous anachronistic cultural mess. The music makes Mumbles’ story a purified allegory of human rituals. As thousands of penguins look up and harmonize in a pop chorale—either singing to the aurora borealis or as father penguins shelter the young until the mothers arrive en masse—Miller creates scenes of awesome “Expectancy.” Really, it’s the damnedest thing since Spielberg’s poeticized vision of Immanence in Close Encounters.

Miller’s career has often hounded Spielberg’s. They have comparable compositional gifts, but Miller’s tempo is different, quirkier. Where Peter Jackson imitates Spielberg’s momentum, Miller uses speed and pop-up surprise distinctively. When little Mumbles is chased by a giant sea lion, the looming terror is so sudden that you only think about Jurassic Park afterward. This sequence is a marvel of photorealistic animal detail and fantasy movement. Later, it’s amazing to see Mumbles housed in an aquarium where he observes actually-photographed human beings through the glass partition. Miller flips our own sense of being: Happy Feet is about penguins, but it connotes human nature writ large.