Happy Feet

J: It's like Moulin Rouge for penguins.

And that's only the beginning.

Ty Burr (best movie reviewer around: smart, erudite, funny, generally agrees with me): What do you get when you cross "March of the Penguins," Disney's "High School Musical," "The Ugly Duckling," a runaway jukebox, "Footloose," Joseph Campbell, "Riverdance," a Greenpeace board meeting, and five hits of prime, Woodstock-era brown acid? You get "Happy Feet," the new computer-animated family film that is quite simply the most bizarre thing under the Antarctic sun.

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.

You've got your conformity narrative (evils thereof), your religious fundamentalism narrative (ditto), your prodigal son narrative, your quest, your March of the Penguins imitation, your environmental depredation, your shockingly-almost-unhappy ending, your wisecracking sidekicks, your George-Clinton-meets-Barry-White guru, your minor breathy females (mother and girlfriend, respectively), and they're all penguins, and they sing and dance, and the finale is an endless vista of penguins tap-dancing to Stevie Wonder's "I Wish." I kid you not.

Truly one of the most insane things I've ever seen. And it's the most popular movie in America.

Am I not getting something, or are they not getting something?

(And if you're wondering whether it's too scary, well, we wondered too. A lot. We googled "happy feet scary" and checked out the IMDB comments and even emailed Ty Burr. There was much conflicting assessment. M decided to bow out. E insisted on going. Three times she said it was scary (the birds, the leopard seals, and the killer whales, as might have been predicted), and I covered her eyes and told her it would be OK (though when Mumble in the zoo started hallucinating his mother dissolving into ash, I had serious doubts). At the end she said she loved it and she was glad I didn't ask if she wanted to leave. Go figure.)

(That night we watched Zoolander which was entertaining enough, especially the gasoline fight to Wham's "Wake Me Up Before You Go Go," and I was struck by the thematic similarities, though the only one I can remember now is his penguin pajamas.)