Happy Feet
Year: 2006
Rating: PG
Length: 108 minutes / 1.80 hours
Very few movies have pivoted so hard on me like Happy Feet (2006). I vaguely remembered the trailers for this film back in the day but wasn’t too interested in it because it wasn’t from Disney or Pixar (I might have also confused it with Surf’s Up (2007)). However, the fact that it won Best Animated Picture for that year should have told me there was something special here. However, my expectations for Happy Feet were much different than the plot twist that I hadn’t seen coming.
Since I was coming in cold to this film (har har), I had expected it to be the standard “individual is unique, but doesn’t fit in with the status quo” type plot. After all, the main character (voiced by Elijah Wood) is the odd-one-out in a community of penguins by being unable to sing. However, this inability to sing is overshadowed by Mumble’s extraordinary ability to dance. The singing and dancing choreographed in a way that only CGI animation can is merely one reason to watch this film. I was also somewhat surprised at how realistic these penguins looked, even for 2006 graphics. Perhaps they had a lot of source footage from March of the Penguins (2005).
Of course, I wasn’t expecting this movie to be about climate change and how humans can be terrible when it comes to animals. Granted, this was after the standard “journey of self-discovery” that I knew was going to happen, but it still was a hard turn from a fairly predictable plot up to that point. Overall, despite changing its focus in the third act, Happy Feet is an entertaining movie. However, it has something to say and still manages to say it, even if it felt a little shoehorned in at the end.
A well-done animated musical that fits in a moral in its third act, I give Happy Feet 4.0 stars out of 5.
