familiar territory revisited

Rating: 5/10 (7 October 2005)

By now, we've seen this story so often (told in various forms) that it's barely worth repeating, but I'll deviate from the temptation to simply start my critical engine and recap for those who've arrived late in the game: when a zebra named Marty (voiced by Chris Rock), domesticated by city life, decides to break free and head to the wild on his 10th birthday, his friends (consisting of a lion, hippo, and giraffe) react strangely, but wind up going on an adventure as they are captured and shipwrecked on an uninhabited island, which leads to the ever-important message of undermined friendships ending in tragedy. "Madagascar" actually has many funny moments (a quartet of scheming penguins are given too little screen time), but the targets of parody ("American Beauty"; "Chariots of Fire") aren't likely to connect with a young audience, and the voice actors seem confined to familiar shtick (Chris Rock in particular seems to be phoning in his performance), which does nothing to help the stale familiarity of the plot and the fact that there's nothing overly distinctive about this film, especially in the wake of "Shrek" and "The Incredibles" (pinnacles of both storytelling and computer animation).