This film inspires hate towards anything non-penguin, including people...

Rating: 2/10 (10 January 2007)

When I first saw the previews for this film, I was really looking forward to it. It looked really fun, and the voice of Robin Williams was definitely very catchy. When I walked out of the theater after having seen it, I was really disappointed. This by far was the worst computer animated movie I have seen yet.
Whenever I go to see computer animated films aimed at reaching out to family audiences, I look for good, innocent fun. Instead, this movie tried to depress me. The director, whose name I really don't care about because this movie was awful, tried to make me feel bad for a penguin that couldn't sing, but who instead had an innate ability to tap dance. The writers and creators of this film tried to use this as a vehicle to make feel bad for the Mumbles, voiced by Elijah Wood, and his inability to sing. It only gets worse from here.
The only good part of this film was the voice talents of Robin Williams and the other Hispanic-accented penguins. They were humorous, but not humorous enough to lighten up the mood of the entire film. I liked the characters: they were fun and enjoyable and they didn't try to make me feel depressed.
What also bothered me about this film was the political agenda embedded within the film. Sure environmental issues are important, but I didn't pay money to listen about how humans are responsible for the so-called "depleting" fish population, which these penguins utilize as a natural resource. To make the film even more political, the writers thought that audiences would enjoy seeing a penguin "abducted" by humans, referred to as aliens in the film. Mumbles, who tries to discover the true reason behind the cause of the scarce resource of fish, is eventually caught by humans and sent to a zoo. The writers tried to do their best to make the living conditions at a zoo seem so terrible for animals, and they tried to do it from an animal perspective. This, I believe, is misinforming because if you see how animals are cared for in a good number of big city zoos, animals are provided with great health-care; which most wild animals do not have. By this point of the film, I was pretty upset... I was upset because they used real footage of people, as opposed to animations. I paid to see an animated film, not an animated film with clips of real people integrated throughout.
I also hated the sexual references made by Robin Williams' character, Lovelace. This is a family film: that's not what I paid to see.
So besides the fact that this movie tried to make me feel bad for people with disabilities, hate seals, seagulls, and killer whales, and over-looking the fact that this film tried to make me hate myself; I don't see any reason to not like this movie... a lot.