Did Not Make My Feet Happy.

Rating: 5/10 (26 February 2007)

I rarely see a movie that is expected to be very good, but ends up not NEARLY as good as I hoped. The movie is about a young penguin who can't sing, when every penguin in Antarctica is expected to have a talent for singing. On the better hand, he can tap dance pretty well. Hearing about this movie at first, it looked good because of the animation, and some talented actors voicing. But I can't completely believe why the story idea was attractive at first. It's not a very good idea for a story. When the penguin is tap dancing, it disastrously looked that the audio and visual weren't synchronized. Maybe it's because of the complex combination and timing of the foot hitting the ground that doesn't adequately match with the number of film frames that can fit in a second. The animation was good, but they didn't do much to clearly distinguish the characters' faces. For example, much of the time, I couldn't tell whether a certain character was Mumble's girlfriend or Mumble's mother. Robin Williams, who is one of my very favorite actors, is a voice actor in this movie. He does the voice for two or three different characters. He was good, I guess, but his performances in the last two or so years have been a lot less classic as some other things he's done. He was a good voice actor for that one Hispanic penguin, but then again, why are the penguins Hispanic? I don't think there are any native Spanish or Mexican penguins out there.
I was watching the movie, and after a while I was wondering, 'what kind of resolution can you get for a movie plot problem about penguin singing vs. penguin dancing?', when in just a few moments, the whole storyline changed into a more dramatic, haunting, global-awareness type of story, with the original plot problem never satisfactorily resolved. I did not think that political issue was what the movie needed. It should have just stayed with the original story idea first mentioned, and somehow come up with a resolution for that.
This movie won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. No. NO. This award was clearly going to be awarded to Cars. If it were my choice, Cars would have won Best Animated Feature, let alone Best Picture. Cars is Pixar, no more explanation needed. If Cars was, for some reason, not here this year, then the award nominations would have gone to Monster House, Flushed Away, Curious George, Everyone's Hero, Over the Hedge, and/or Ice Age: The Meltdown. I would even award this Oscar to Doogal before Happy Feet. Happy Feet must have won the award only because of the global-awareness/political issue. But let me say it again: I do not think that this issue is what the movie needed. This is, in my opinion, the worst animated movie of the year, that I saw (I didn't see some animated movies this year; some of them looked worse than Happy Feet). Movie awards often seem to be awarded to the more dramatic than entertaining types of movies. I think Oscars and other movie awards should be awarded to more entertaining movies than dramatic movies. If that had been the case, this movie would have been a lot different, and, in my opinion, better.
5/10