Largely indifferent about the whole thing.

Rating: 4/10 (7 July 2005)

If you've seen the previous Dreamworks Animation movie, Shark Tale, then you can expect more or less the same loud, in-your-face, mentality that made the first movie a success. Both use New York as a setting, borrow loud booming music from years' past, and reference movies and TV to keep adults awake. With the exception of the show-stealing penguins however, Madagascar is more geared towards short-attention span children as, once again, the imaginative use of CGI of the animals save this movie from a snoring audience.
At the Central Park Zoo, Marty the zebra escapes towards Conneticut to find out what life is like in the wild. His friends, Alex, Gloria and Melman, stop him at Grand Central Station only for them to be captured and ended up put back in the wild.
During the movie, there's a reference to the original Planet of the Apes. Hearing this, you automatically know it has to be one of two scenes, and that's the whole point I'm trying to make. Madagascar's references stink and just drives home another point: there's not a shred of originality in the movie. There's another reference to an episode of The Twilight Zone ("To Serve Lemur", ho ho), which kids will obviously not get since it was over 40 years ago and that's how the movie will be like to adults. Aside from the references in the movie, there's also the morals. There's a lemur that gets up and sings to, "I Like to Move It," from Reel 2 Reel. Which is fine, and throughout the movie there's word switching to references for the kids, but this King Lemur is dancing with a bunch of girls, telling them how much he likes their bodies moving and how to do it. Once again, I have no problems with a promiscuous lemur (do you?), but this being a kids movie, I would have preferred him to say how much he likes kids, instead of girls, to get up and dance, and there would be a bunch of children in the theater aisles dancing for ten-fifteen minutes and parents would be happy. We also see the animals accepting life being marooned in the middle of nowhere, so they try sea-water. They spray it all over the place and for about five minutes we see our kids laugh and get it in their heads that spraying their drink all over the dining table is largely acceptable because, you know, it tastes like seawater. If your children insist, I suggest renting the movie since there are far better movies being pumped out this year, but if they loved Shark Tale, they will no doubt love this movie just the same.