Not a New Yorker? Well, you won't quite get it.

Rating: 10/10 (3 June 2005)

What can I say? I had a great,great time at the movies! "Madagascar" is a well done, smartly written piece of animation. Cleverly stylized and and excellently executed on the formal level, it is also one of the smartest animated things around. Still, as much as I enjoyed it - I don't blame people from outside the Big Apple who don't quite get it. The humor in this movie is very precisely targeted towards relatively small, but very influential piece of population: those of us who have ever lived, live now or are planing to live in The Greatest City on the Planet (does the phrase 'you're on the Jersey side!' sound funny to you? Well, you get the picture.) Never heard of New York minute? Never had a bagel and a cup o'Joe to go in the morning? Never rode the #6 train uptown on the rush hour? Fugheddaboudit! But if you are in love in the Naked City as much as I am, you're going to love this movie. The characters are very much an animated version of Woody Allen's characters; the settings are as beautiful as New York can be when you see them through loving eyes... and Hans Zimmer's variation on "Rhapsody in Blue" will make your spirit soar. However, for those of you who have kids you want to entertain, or those who think the whole New York thing is just a bunch of rubbish - take my advice: go watch "Robots" or the like.