The Dance of the Emperor: in the excellent Happy Feet, a group of penguins rejects a youngling that can't sing - only tap dance

Rating: Null/10 (20 December 2006)

The Australian George Miller produces little (only nine of long length) and directs even less (only seven movies since 1979). But, when he does any of the two, uses to show what he came for. Such as in Mad Max, that invented the post-apocalyptic adventure, and Babe: Pig in the City, one of the best kid movies ever made. Now, after almost five years of insane hard work, Miller repeats the feat: Happy Feet is an absolutely original cartoon - a musical and comedy that evolves into epic and tragedy, in an animation of extraordinary beauty. (By the way, also original for going into production before the March of the Penguins documentary.) Miller starts from real data - that each penguin emperor develops a distinct "voice". In his movie, sing well (from Queen and Prince to Frank Sinatra) is the pride of the emperors, and the reason which Mumble is born already as a pariah: his singing is direful. He only knows how to express himself by tap dancing, something that the emperors never heard about and immediately reject. Organized in a puritan and conformist society, they think that shaking the hips, or even only the feet, is a profanity.
Happy Feet starts, so, as a classic story - of the rejected puppy -, in a background that remembers the first times of the rock, when the United States went through scandals with the white kids that adhered to the black tradition of the rhythm. From them on it follows on the heroic journey of Mumble, that will get him to know a small community of Latin penguins of Adelia, to hear the prophecies of a group of fatalists sea-elephants and, finally, to discover that the scarcity of food, that the ancients attributes to his birth, is in truth a result of the actions of beings that moves in colossal floating devices, that captures an infinite amount of fish. Sort of like Ulysses, Mumble will see himself stuck in a deserted island (actualy an aquarium), and then will undertake a return not only triumphal, but also revealing.
As Mumble's horizons extends, grows also the ambition of the movie - until it becomes truly huge, as in the image of the fishermen in the mist or in the sequence where the emperor faces the attack of two whales. First time in cartoons, the director took to Happy Feet his capacity to conceive entire living worlds. To the example of the nuclear desert of Mad Max or the rural perfection of Babe, his Antarctica is at the same time realist and impregnated of amazement. What multiplies this effect, however, is the counterpoint with the intimacy and detail of how the characters are portrayed - the "puppy factor" that no commercial cartoon can (or want) to live without.