No story, no fun, no point

Rating: 2/10 (9 August 2010)

Me and my girlfriend watched this for half an hour and then unanimously decided to give up on it, which doesn't happen often. In retrospect I found out that this even won an Academy Award for best animated movie of the year: wow, it must have been a very dire year for animated movies - - or otherwise this is further proof how worthless the Oscar really is as indicator for good movies.
Basically this is March Of The Penguins as a computer-animated cartoon with a bit of humour thrown in. They tried to make this look relatively realistic and non-anthropomorphic rather than cute and cuddly. In consequence, the movie is still far too unrealistic to be educational or enlightening, and it isn't very entertaining either. The jokes are few and not that good, the dialogues not that witty, and the plot is pretty inane: a penguin couple hatches an "odd" chick which stumbles strangely. A little later we learn that every penguin has its "heartsong" (pass the sick bag, please), except for our little penguin, who prefers to dance (incidentally, the dancing isn't that impressive, probably because animated tapdancing rarely is). He is ostracised by his peers but starts to win the heart of this penguin girl. At this point I switched off. What probably would have followed is a story about inclusiveness (it's OK to be different) and to thy own self be true.
Incidentally, we saw another but excellent animated movie about penguins immediately afterward, Surf's Up, which I can highly recommend. Just to show you that I'm not biased against penguin-themed cartoons per se.