Happy Feet - a movie that truly blew ass

Rating: 1/10 (8 December 2006)

For those who say the second half is what ruined the movie, I shall begin by saying the first half of the movie blew just as much as the second half, just in different ways.
The first half was uneventful, and carried the core plot of a good half of every children's movie ever made. A character is different and faces adversity in what you think is a movie-long plot about him finding his place and being beautifully unique. YOU THINK this is what you're in store for with Happy Feet, and for the first half of the movie I sat there thinking "Wow, this is really unoriginal, there isn't even any side plot happening or anything really interesting at all, but the seal part was cool. Wait no not really. Yeah that blew too." Mumbles, the main penguin who has his own set of flaws that are never addressed, (that i will certainly address later) has an object of desire, and I forget her name. She is the most beautiful penguin ever, he is an outcast and weird, you get it. So once she decides that she wants to be with him, he turns her down. I suppose this is because he doesn't want her to come with them out of concern for her safety, but he was unnecessarily dick in how he went about doing it. So, she doesn't come, and you are left with a big WTF at this point as to why that scene was even there. She should have never come after him and that whole thing never should have happened. This lovely scene brings a close to act 1 of this masterpiece, and the second half begins.
This half was a lot more entertaining, plot-wise, too bad it was the equivalent of watching a pile of compost decay. Key errors in plot are how a penguin who isn't even fully grown manages to swim from Antarctica to wherever he landed, Australia or New York, either one is way out of reach, and how he got back to his home. I assume the zookeepers/whoever put him there wanted to see other penguins like him, but how did they know where to put him? Did they just drop him in Antarctica somewhere and check on him now and then to see if he was near other penguins? Sure was convenient how the helicopter swooped down right as he was closing in on his home turf. Wait he never closed in on it, he just appeared there suddenly. In addition to the plot flaws, the original plot is completely abandoned, and in comes Greenpeace. I'm all for global conservation, but fishing in Antarctica really isn't that high up there on the world issues meter. Anyway my personal favorite part of the movie is when the world leaders get the message that the penguins are starving because they can all dance. They love the dancing, yet say "MAYBE ITS CUZ WE IS TAKIN ALL THEY FISH". So, immediately they pull out all fishing vessels from Antarctica in an effort to stop them from dancing. Didn't they all love the dancing? Isn't dancing usually a sign of happiness rather than starvation? Wait, no, I am clearly wrong. Next time I get hungry I will do a little jig and perhaps someone will take note of it and provide for me a slab of ribs. Anyway back to the matter of removing all the vessels. Now this is a kid's movie, but you ever wonder why kids are so naive and improperly informed with concerns to how the world works? Maybe it has to do with something like the media they are fed tells them that if penguins start dancing, immediately all the companies with fishing vessels in Antarctica will throw their investments away, probably along with their businesses, just to save the penguins that they knew they were killing in the first place. Come on. If you're gonna put Greenpeace ish in your movie at least provide a viable solution to the problem.
I said I would address the problems with Mumbles, and sure enough I am. Definitely don't get why his face is different from all the other penguins. Or why his mom keeps saying HES NOT DIFFERENT whenever his dad says he is. Are you kidding? All the other penguins are two cgi images, one male one female, copied over and over. i.e. IDENTICAL. This penguin looks nothing like them and there is debate over whether he is different or not. Of course he is different, there is no question, this is just nonsense to fill time, much like 90% of the movie. And how come he gets to have the voice of tommy from rugrats as a kid. That was dead on, and that lady who did his voice can do a lot more voices than that. Also he should have figured out to stop trying to sing sooner. He blew ass. Just like this movie.