#Dancing mumble penguin movie#
The movie gives us a series of entertaining, but mostly unconnected, sequences: Mumbles is chased by an underwater predator he meets a predatory bird who describes his abduction by aliens (i.e. Since emperor penguins are (apparently) supposed to sing and not dance, Mumble becomes an outcast.įor the first 45 minutes, Happy Feet doesn’t really seem like it’s going anywhere. He also emerges from his egg speaking fluent English. In fact, he dances much like famed hoofer Savion Glover (who, through the miracle of motion capture, provided Mumble’s top-tapping moves). When the baby penguin, named Mumble (Elijah Wood), is born, he looks a little different than the other penguins and he can’t sing at all. While she’s on a trek to find food, he accidentally drops the egg. Memphis and Norma Jean get together and produce an egg. Or maybe they somehow heard the Tom Jones remake. How any of them have heard Prince is not explained. At first, they look like normal penguins until they spontaneously burst into Prince’s pop classic “Kiss.” We are told that all penguins possess a “heart song” that guides them to their mate. We immediately meet two penguins – the Elvis-like Memphis (Hugh Jackman) and the Marilyn-esque Norma Jean (Nicole Kidman). This has to be one of the strangest movies I’ve ever seen, animated or otherwise. Well, except for the singing and dancing. These are the exact same images that we saw in 2005’s March of the Penguins. Thousands of emperor penguins waddle around Antarctica in a straight line, eventually gathering at a common area to find their mate. It would have to be called The Happy Truth, I guess, or perhaps Inconvenient Feet.The opening moments of Happy Feet gave me a sense of déjà vu. I can envision an animated-documentary-mashup of Happy Feet and An Inconvenient Truth. Dance is king! And yet, back here in the real world, the dancer Savion Glover doesn’t get much credit while the actors with outlandish voices get all the attention.įWIW, I was surprised that the film’s environmental message was so prominent, and vigorous.
He’s ridiculed and ostracized for this outlaw skill, but ultimately teaches the whole band of singing penguins to dance, and all’s well in the end. In Mumble’s penguin world, you need a great singing voice poor Mumble can’t sing at all, but he’s a natural dancer. But what’s particularly ironic to me about this story is that Rockwell’s argument highlights the exact opposite of the movie’s plot. I agree with Rockwell that it would have been nice if Glover had gotten more attention for his role (although he’s certainly getting it now). I love George Miller, and was happy to be a part of the film.
Glover, Rockwell writes, “seems to have gotten a ludicrously raw deal,” and he goes so far as to imply racism (Glover is black) when he writes that Glover’s omission from the main credits “seems especially worrisome when the dance being slighted is deeply rooted in the black American tradition.” This despite the fact that Glover himself seems to think that Rockwell doth protest too much: “My job was to be a stunt man.
While conceding that the film’s director, George Miller, has openly acknowledged and praised Glover’s contribution, Rockwell bemoans the fact that Glover gets very, very low billing in the film’s credits while the actors who voiced the animated characters - Elijah Wood, Robin Williams, Nicole Kidman - get the star treatment. It was Glover who wore a motion-capture bodysuit and performed all the dancing that was then turned into the animated dancing of Mumble, the film’s penguin star. Times about how the tap-dancing master Savion Glover is the unsung hero of Happy Feet. John Rockwell wrote an impassioned essay in the N.Y.
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