Very unentertaining excuse for a family movie

Rating: 2/10 (6 April 2010)

I really like animated adventures and comedies. I sometimes even go out them in a company of equally adult people and if not I just wait for the movies to be aired on TV. Since the adult people told me to see "Madagascar" because "thre are lemurs who like to move it, move it", I watched it.
The first thing that hit me was the general unfriendliness of the movie. It is obviously the fault of Disney that I've got used to really pretty and cuddly animal characters and subtle intelligent dialog and couldn't appreciate the sharp-edged caricatures of animals and forced unfunny slang. Of course I judge the language only by the Polish dubbed version, but I'm sure that if the original dialog were decent, the Polish producers wouldn't provide a translation that sounds neither smart nor polite. I may be speaking a bit too much like a teacher now, but I believe that even the funniest entertainment for children should have some intellectually stimulating element instead of pumping utterly dumb and not even funny "humor" into children's heads.
The second major disadvantage is the lack of the plot. The animals escape from the ZOO and arrive at Madagascar. End of the story. There are some obstacles on the way, the famous penguin sub-plot, dancing lemurs and the lion's moral conflict, but all of that together don't really form a story.
Let me analyze now the moral conflict of the lion and explain why I find this movie really disgusting.
Every child, unless brought up by vegans, experiences this moment when he/she fully understands that meat comes from animals and accepts it by the law of nature. Again, Disney brings back the memory of the Lion King's Circle of Life with its deep and almost philosophical message. There must be something meaningful in the movies and stories about talking animals. They can either present the laws of nature (animals act like animals) or serve as an allegory of human society (animals act like people) and a child's mind is perfectly able to work in these two worlds. But the conflict presented in "Madagascar" works in neither.
It shows the lion's natural instinct of eating animal flesh as something immoral and sick that can be overcome by friendship, forgiveness and some sort of therapy. Unless that instinct is an allegory of alcoholism or domestic violence, it is all totally wrong. Lions and other carnivores cannot stop eating meat using their good will and it is something children shouldn't be tricked into believing. Of course there are cartoons in which cats and aardvarks go to school and eat apple pie, but then they don't want to eat their neighbors and friends, just like it is common in the human society, excluding concentration camps and planes crashed on the iceberg.
If I were little when I watched "Madagascar" the image of a zebra and lemurs turning into steaks would have given me a reason not to sleep at night. And the scene with the lion biting the zebra's butt is not funny at all. I don't know how it was supposed to be humorous in any way, if what he wanted was to feed on his flesh, injure him and probably kill. Maybe some people find it funny just because it was the butt and nothing bad happened after all.
The solution to the lion's moral conflict is eating fish. "Fish instead of meat" is an unrealistic change of eating habits in animal world and doesn't represent any consistent ethics in the human society (apart of some religious fasting or some sort of unsaturated fat diet). It may be a sigh of relief for kids who cared about the characters in the movie, but it doesn't help them develop any useful attitude towards real life animals with this false belief that laws of nature can be changed. I can also hear with my mind's ear some vegans arguing that "a fish has the same right to live as a zebra!".
But that's all about meat and upbringing. But what people - adults and young ones - liked the most were the penguins and the song. The problem is that when the minor characters steal the show it means the movie wasn't very well constructed. And the song wasn't an original one, it's in fact a well known piece, which by being associated with "Madagascar" brought the movie extra popularity.
The swinging lemur, who likes to move it, move it, however, is something very special. Silly and powerful, vain and insane - I'm taking King Julien out of this movie with his bigger crown with a gecko on it to adore him in peace.
Apart from the penguins and King Julien there's absolutely nothing enjoyable in this movie and with its perverted ethics and poor dialog I rate is as unsuitable for the audiences of any age.
1/10 +1 for King Julien.