It's a good movie, but it collapses completely in the final 45 minutes.

Rating: 5/10 (14 June 2020)

Once upon a time there was a land in Antarctica where penguins knew how to sing wonderfully to mate... once upon a time there was a penguin who did not know how to sing but, instead, danced tap dancing wonderfully. Once upon a time, there was an animated film with penguins (another one) that wanted to tell an incredible story but didn't know how to finish it.
In short, this is how the plot of this film comes down, another one that uses penguins to attract the children, which has a predilection for this cute and friendly animal. The film intelligently addresses group social behaviour, the creation of patterns, what is acceptable or unacceptable in a community, social exclusion and the acceptance of what is different, and the film is excellent at exploring all of this and gives rise to many interesting moral lessons for the minds of children and young people. But, if we exclude this more didactic and formative point, the script is very thin and hardly sustains an 100 minutes feature film. To make matters worse, the script was unable to decently complete the story: the main character's journey to the human world is something so unrealistic and unlikely that it completely destroys the film.
The voice actors all did a good job, especially Elijah Wood, the veteran of the 1000 voices Robin Williams, and also Brittany Murphy. The visual quality of the animation is very good, but the use of digital resources, CGI and mass computing already made this to be expected, as it is the new standard of modern animated cinema. The film knows how to use light and color very well. The characters were designed to appeal to the little ones and look cute, making the film profitable and giving rise to a merchandising machine eager to make the children ask their parents for anything with a penguin on it. Strongly based on music, the film has a lot of rhythm and the soundtrack is probably one of the richest in the animated movies that decade, but it is a soundtrack heavily based on well-known songs and covers by artists like Elvis, Prince, Earth Wind & Fire etc. As far as I can tell, the film has few or no original songs. Still, it is a good soundtrack and an excellent film, good enough to win the Oscar for Best Animated Film, in that distant year of 2007.