Moriarty Loves HAPPY FEET And Is Baffled By Those Who Don't!!

And I am here to tell you, folks... Massawyrm is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Every now and then, Harry goes completely off the reservation and puts two and six together and gets fifty-three, and he’ll write one of those reviews where you’re sure that mescaline and a dare was somehow involved in the way Harry connects the dots. That’s why he’s Harry. But even at his most intentionally provocative, Harry’s never written anything as strange as that glib (I’m stealing the word back), snide attack on a genuinely thoughtful film that is absolutely one of the best animated films released this year, and probably since THE INCREDIBLES. George Miller is no slouch. In fact, it’s safe to say George Miller is one of the few untamed young lions of the ‘80s. He never got into the habit of cranking out blockbusters and chasing opening weekends year after year after year. He’s walked away from better jobs than most people will ever be offered. He’s created several classics already, and I’m willing to bet he’s got more in him. I took my wife and my son to see HAPPY FEET because I knew Miller was involved, hoping for something that would be diverting enough with the singing and dancing to keep him entertained. He’s sixteen months now, and at home, he’ll watch anything with music in it. His mom showed him SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN, for example, and he danced every time the people onscreen did. In addition, penguins are not exactly an unknown quantity in our house. After MARCH OF THE PENGUINS, my wife became fond of stuffed penguins, particularly the baby ones. Then about a month ago, Warner Bros. sent out stuffed dancing penguins that will dance to whatever music you put on, or even just to the sound of your voice. And so Toshi and the penguin would dance to salsa music together in the kitchen while his grandmother was cooking. Seriously. Diverting would have been enough for me to be satisfied with the film. I’ve seen most of the animated kids films this year, like ANT BULLY and THE BARNYARD and OPEN SEASON, and I’ve seen them early, but chosen not to write about them. Honestly, I couldn’t. Those movies made me depressed about animation as a storytelling technique. Those movies are so painfully formulaic, and although they were obviously expensive and there are obviously talented animators involved with these and with OVER THE HEDGE and with CARS and with FLUSHED AWAY. There are probably more talented CG artists right now than there ever were conventional 2D animators at any one time. And what are they working on? Well... junk, pretty much. I’m sorry to say it, but it’s true. OPEN SEASON is a film worth being mad at. OPEN SEASON is corrupt and empty and deals in easy stereotype. They might as well have called it MARTIN LAWRENCE IS JIVE BEAR AND ASHTON KUTCHER IS DONKEY FROM SHREK. That’s it. That’s all the movie’s got going on. And there’s a lot of visual firepower expended telling this truly depressing nonstory. It’s a technically proficient film, and everyone involved with crafting it deserves to work again. But they should be working on something of merit. They should be working on something that has something to say. In a year that has been overstuffed with babysitter movies, movies that appear to have been assembled from kits, HAPPY FEET commits the cardinal sin of having something complex on its mind. There’s something profoundly subversive about a film called HAPPY FEET that takes a third-act left turn (and we’ll talk about spoilers later) that is anything but joyous. In fact, the last time I saw a “children’s” film that was this subversive, it was the criminally underrated and breathtakingly bold BABE 2: PIG IN THE CITY. Funny how that works, isn’t it? Speaking as an actual parent, and not a hypothetical one, I was quite moved by the way Miller’s film unfolds, and I think it dares to raise some important questions about the nature of life. I would welcome the conversation with my child about this film’s themes and ideas after the movie, the way I’d welcome any opportunity to talk to my child about such things as faith, identity, love, and family. But wait... seriously... isn’t this that film with Robin Williams doing a bunch of voices? And a bunch of pop songs? And tapdancing? Yep. Sure is. The film starts by letting you in on the way the music’s going to work. One voice at a time, one song at a time, every song something we recognize. The songs combining, coming together, swelling and rising, as we move in on the place these voices come from, the home of the penguins, the great breeding ground. Everyone’s strutting and looking, and the songs are flirtation and foreplay. Just as Baz Luhrmann used the emotional shorthand inherent to songs we recognize, Miller has a real sense of whimsy, something you can’t fake. When Memphis (Hugh Jackman) uses Elvis tunes to woo Norma Jean (an adorably breathy Nicole Kidman) and she sings back with Prince’s “Kiss,” it’s sweet and charming and joyous. This film doesn’t just use music because it sells soundtracks. It’s in love with the music it uses, and that makes all the difference. Memphis and Norma Jean have an egg, and here’s where the film really benefits from last year’s release of MARCH OF THE PENGUINS. When Norma Jean leaves Memphis with the egg and goes off in search of food, you know why the women are leaving, and you know what’s ahead for the fathers. Miller’s film gets it all right, and it’s scary. In fact, there’s a lot of this film that is scary. It’ll probably get your kid’s heart pumping. That’s sort of what Miller is great at, though. The car chases of ROAD WARRIOR. The Thunderdome. The NIGHTMARE AT 20,000 FEET segment in the TWILIGHT ZONE movie. Miller made medical research seem like action scenes in LORENZO’S OIL. His BABE movies are both classics in their own right, and almost completely different films. Throughout his movies, he seems to maintain a complex philosophy that is expansive, compassionate, and inclusive. I think Miller is a very moral filmmaker, and thoughtful. HAPPY FEET is the story of Mumble (E.G. Dailey at first), the son of Memphis and Norma Jean. He’s the one penguin who can’t sing. When he opens his mouth, he honks. He makes a terrible painful sound. It’s awful. And nothing helps. But there’s this thing he does... it’s hard to explain... it’s like the music that other people make gets inside of him and it’s gotta come out somehow and since he can’t sing, it comes out as a sort of a shake and a shiver and... dancing. Tap dancing, specifically. And Mumble’s dancing is so spontaneous and reactive and free that it freaks everybody else out. So far, so good. That’s what the trailer was selling. That’s the diversion we were looking for. The world of the penguin is every bit as dangerous in Miller’s film as it is in life. Killer seals, killer whales... I think the whole “killer” motif sort of sets the stakes. You can be eaten by a bird if you’re not careful, for pissakes. There are some great harrowing sequences in this film, and based on a screening tonight in Los Angeles, I’d say IMAX would be the perfect way to see this film. Miller’s crew has created an immersive, kinetic world, and the most amazing thing about it is that they pulled it off at all. Remember, this isn’t by Dreamworks or Pixar or some established animation studio. Miller’s crew wasn’t coming off of some other animated film. They were put together for this movie, and so they were pretty much having to establish all of their vocabulary as they worked. They were having to decide where they could put their cameras based on how well they thought they could render their characters, and they kept revising their visual plan as they worked, as they were able to make a series of breakthroughs in terms of performance capture and feather and motion rendering. In continually honing the technical side of things, what they were doing was freeing themselves up in terms of storytelling and performance, the things that really matter. HAPPY FEET is a really nice mix of performance capture and pure animation. Miller uses each for very particular things, and he doesn’t really try to humanize the animals in the film. They’ve all got personalities, certainly, but they still behave like animals. When Mumble ventures out, away from his penguin group, he starts to get a picture of a bigger world, and he starts to realize that just because he’s considered “inferior” by his immediate peer group, that doesn’t mean he is. He begins to question his place in things, and he starts to find his place. He makes friends who accept him for who he is. And he starts to realize that some of the things that his entire tribe accepts, some of their fundamental beliefs, may in fact be wrong. Or at the very least, they may not be the whole picture. I don’t want to synopsize any more of the film, even if others have spoiled with abandon, but it’s obvious that HAPPY FEET is about the way we develop as people, and the way one person’s gifts, if utilized the right way at the right time, can change the world. It’s about listening to your own voice. HAPPY FEET doesn’t fit that Campbell-approved hero’s journey model that every film ever uses now. Not exactly. Mumble isn’t a hero like Luke Skywalker or Harry Potter. And here’s where we start to get into spoiler territory, so I’ll try to speak generally, since I think audiences should be allowed to experience the ending themselves. I think it’s obviously told in bold, broad visual strokes, and it’s a lot of really big ideas dealt with as simple quick bits of info, and I think it works really well. Miller introduces some actual live-action elements into the film in such a sly way that I wasn’t sure what I was seeing at first. It’s definitely a big leap, stylistically, but I think it really pays off in terms of impact. The film’s big climax is great because it brings the film full circle, using a convention of the musical genre (the big dance number) to pay off emotionally and thematically at the same time. This is a film that I would happily leave in rotation as part of my child’s cinema diet, and one that will pop up in rotation in my own diet as well. Films like this do tremendously well on DVD no matter what, but I’d argue that this is one of those films that demands the theatrical experience, and the IMAX presentation of the film just adds to its surprising power. It’s a rich, occasionally overwhelming visual experience, but it’s also a sophisticated bit of all-audiences storytelling. This is not a “kid’s film,” and I think that’s a good thing since films that pander to kids tend to insult them in equal measure. This film respects its audience to be able to have a complex reaction to something. Even kids. Massawyrm’s certainly not the only person to reject the film’s ambitions outright. I got another indignant letter today from someone complaining about a movie trying to “sneak in some stuff the kids won’t even understand,” and I’m not really sure where this outrage is coming from. There were many things I saw in my formative years that contained layers of subtext that I didn’t understand then, but that I internalized in some way, and this film will certainly give you plenty to talk about. It never forgets to entertain along the way, though, and if that’s all you want from it, you’ll be amply rewarded. But if you’re not all ascared by a movie with something on its mind, whether you agree with it or not, then HAPPY FEET may be an early holiday gift for you, as it was for me. Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles