A DreamWorks Lesson about the Food Chain

Rating: 5/10 (23 October 2006)

Wow, they just keep peppering us mainstreamers with animated comedies, don't they? In any case, this is a lesson you will want to skip or at least drift off into thought or scribble in your notebook during. I think the makers have got the basic idea right: take wild animals  a Zebra, a Lion, a Giraffe and a Hippo  raise them domesticated in the glossy captivity of a New York zoo, then ship them off to Africa and see how well they do out in the wild. The film is an ecological/social experiment of sorts in which you essentially extract the average Joe from his comfortable life and plug him into hell. There is a wealth of potential in a premise like this, but DreamWorks suffers far more hits than misses in 'Madagascar'.
The characters of the 'experiment' are Marty the lively Zebra, Alex the emo Lion, Gloria the street-sassed ghetto Hippo and Melman the neurotic giraffe. So as you can tell, the cast have their assigned quirks instilled from scene 01. Many people have remarked how they loved Chris Rock as Marty but didn't care for Ben Stiller as Alex  I feel the opposite way and it is important that I debunk the myth that Rock does a good voicework here; his screamy pitch makes me ears bleed. Stiller, on the other hand, keeps the reality-based subtlety in his role by using a very vanilla voice. DreamWorks regrettably neglects the paramount aspect of a good film: layered, interesting characters. None of these are remotely interesting.
Although characters aside, Madagascar is not a total loss as it generously offers comedy. In the front row for the humour part is the sedative-induced euphoria that Alex experiences as he is shot with tranquilizers by the Zoo-staff. In the second row is the hard-boiled escapist quartet of penguins that botch their way through zoo-breaks. In the third row is the inexplicably hilarious gecko on King Julian's (of the lemurs) crown. In the fourth row is the clever American Beauty spoof, down to the very incongruous Thomas Newman music. The bad news is that evenly spread throughout the rows is goofball, madcap nonsense (usually not the good kind), pratfalls and fart-jokes for the kids.
Adversely, the good news is that in the time of animated comedies copying so much from each other and recycling riffs from their own libraries, Madagascar remains surprisingly original  generic, yes, but crisply original in characters and story. The animation is less crisp and appears to be abandoning the meticulous nature frames of Shrek and Nemo, moving back to the clunky and crude animated effects that we got a taste of in Blue Sky Studios' babies Robots and Ice Age (yet the crudeness worked wonderfully in the latter). Here it works to a point, but never offers the film a solid base onto which to fall back on when the plot fails, and it often does...
In fact, one of Madagascar's biggest problems is that there is not a clear-cut plot outline. Once the animals have made out of their way from the crates onboard the ship, been thrown off-board and floated ashore onto the wild of Madagascar, the story completely falls apart because no one can figure out quite what to do with these characters. Let them explore, let them get back in touch with their animalistic instincts that have been permanently quenched in the latte-sipping, steak-dining, humane life of the Zoo. Let them face the harshness of the food chain. This is why I propose viewing the film as a social/ecological experiment and not a story.
5 out of 10