The Lion King it ain't, in what is an often languid animation doing well to stop the then bandwagon from rolling on any further.

Rating: 5/10 (2 March 2012)

Above all else, Madagascar is just a misfire; something which is surprising given the genre within which it falls into and the company whom produced it. On the heels of 1995's Toy Story, the most influential English-language American film of the last twenty years in both a commercial and technological sense, an array of digitally animated films clocking in at about 85 or-so minutes found their way into cinemas and pretty much across the board ticked enough boxes to keep audiences coming back for more and more. The audience cross-pollination sagged here and there with the likes of the first Shrek, whilst narratively floundering on the odd occasion with the first Ice Age, but were on the whole energised and uplifting films telling simplistic tales and done so with the right politics in mind. 2005 saw the release of Madagascar, a foray into this territory which is tiresome and discentered; clocking in with one of those aforementioned short run-times but feeling longer; a piece unsure as to whether it's got an animal rights message at the core of it or not and not entirely certain as to whether it's a prison 'breakout' movie; a 'castaway' movie or something along the lines of The Wizard of Oz wherein the overlying theme reads something like: "There's no place like home".
A common criticism in regards to films such as these often lie with where they actually go in a thematic sense when squared up against where its characters go in a physical one. In this regard, the first two Toy Story films (and the third, years later) barely got beyond that of a neighbourhood block located within the digified universe those films were set, and yet that sense of adventure and character progression was omnipresent. Madagasacar lurches from New York City to the open seas to unpopulated-by-humankind tropical islands run by lemurs; extravagant recreations of the streets of the Big Apple arriving in tow with that of impressive, expansive compositions of waves and the wilds of the ocean roaring around a large container ship. Yet, the film is essentially a lot of running around and shouting by that of voice over talent we feel have been cast based on who they are moreover whether their voices suit the characters they're brining to life.
The film covers an array of animals more commonly associated with the wilds of Africa than that of New York City, and their adventures are here depicted. Initially based at an open plan Central Park zoo, we are quick to associate the supporting acts with an array of what might be perceived as clichéd New Yorker archetypes. There is the David Schwimmer voiced Giraffe Melman, who's paranoid about germs and mental health and strikes us as an anthropomorphic representation of those unshaven, long haired trench-coat wearing middle aged men we often picture babbling to themselves and anyone who'll listen as they shuffle down a public street. There is Jada Pinkett Smith's Hippopotamus Gloria, a larger than life black woman setting (along with Beyoncé Knowles's Foxxy Cleopatra from 2002's second Austin Powers sequel) African-American stereotypes back about twenty years with her hearty, exuberant, jive-talking' cander. On top of these two, there are a handful of monkeys whom best try to capture your more standardised city-set commuters whom intermingle onto subways and such in their coats; hats and with their newspapers sipping coffee from beverages cups and downing donuts since they missed breakfast.
At the core of all of this is that of a friendship between a Lion and a Zebra, Ben Stiller's king of the jungle in Alex and Chris Rock's striped prey-of-said-beast named Marty – only they don't initially know that one is one and the other is indeed t'other. Things kick off with a dream sequence wherein Marty wishes to be out and free and bounding over Savannas away from the pen and public ogling. Where one feels suppressed, the other feels the opposite; Alex is a guy who loves the attention and the praise paying customers heap onto him as he roars and struts and acts out to his audience. Through some events involving the zoo's penguin population, of whom are already concocting their own plan to escape to their indigenous home of Antartica and of whom are the best thing about the film, Marty, with most of the rest of the animals, breakout and land in heaps of trouble following brief integration with the outside world. Events have them shipped back to their natural habitat, but they end up shipwrecked elsewhere in a place which is never sure as to whether it's a Utopian paradise and represents everything Marty wants nor an unnerving Dystopia wherein true colours are brought out in people.
In essence, the central pairing of Marty and Alex grows tiresome; Sacha Baron Cohen pops up as an energetic leader of a group of those previously mentioned lemurs, but sports a misplaced mock-Indian accent and merely sings and dances a lot as everybody else avoids the native hyenas. The film is a confused effort, a film at one point exclusively about a three-way power exchange; at others a cast away movie, yet ultimately a piece which looses sight of its depicting of Marty's lessons on the wider world being a larger, scarier thing not as glamorous as he initially thought. There rears up this tract about realising life always finds a way, and that existence demands thins thing called the 'food chain' in constant operation; a sad, downer tone applied to the harsh realities of life then blown apart by newfound instances of cheating nature by wrapping everything up with a nice, happy ending wherein everyone can co-exist and the hyenas are the villains. It is mostly nonsense, colourful and exuberant nonsense, but nonsense none-the-less.