Maddie (Back to the Outback)

Maddie is the main protagonist of the 2021 animated film, . She is a big-hearted Inland Taipan snake who lived in the Sydney zoo where she was always presented as a vile creature to humans until she got tired of being treated like a monster, and then ran away with her friends who were discriminated against, to the Outback in an attempt to reunite with their families.
She is voiced by , who also voiced Beans in and Toothiana in .
==Personality==
Despite her status as a deadly snake (and having evil snake stereotypes just like other snake) and being called "monster", Maddie is actually the kindest creature - she is kind, caring, friendly, benevolent, intelligent, polite and very sensitive. She is very optimistic person who loves spending time with friends or helping others. But for some serious reasons her optimism can be ruined because if something horrible happens to her (for example abuse) or her friends (like loosing them) she often cries. At first, she believed that humans would love her but seeing that Chaz didn't care about her and that everyone got scared when they saw her, Maddie sank into depression (and almost cried), not considering herself special before deciding to give up this life of prejudice for something better.
When she first met Pretty Boy, Maddie was slightly more tolerant of him than her friends who openly despised the obnoxious koala, although she disliked his condescending behavior throughout the journey, ending up berating and even slapping him in the face a few times. However, the two rivals slowly come to see themselves as true friends, even family. When Zoe, Frank and Nigel were captured by Chaz and bikers and she hadn't enough power to chase them, she broke down in tears showing that she is caring about them and fearful of loss. It also took a moment for Maddie to realize that her three lifelong friends were just as much a family that she would never want to leave, showing that she truly loves them.
Due to being treated like a freak, Maddie developed a certain contempt for humans. This contempt diminished after meeting a little girl who found her as good as she was, also making her realize that not all humans are bad. She also had compassion for this same girl because of their similarity to seeing themselves as monsters.
==Appearance==
Maddie is a western inland taipan, who unlike her real life counterpart has a large round head with beautiful big yellow eyes with eyelashes and purple pupils. If she is sad or crying, her eyes become pale. Unlike others of her species shown in the movie she has blue skin instead of brown. Possibly it's some sort of mutation.
==History==
===Background===
While still in her egg, Maddie could hear the tender song her mother was singing to her. One day, her egg got carried away by the waves and almost got eaten by fish and an eagle before ending up in the desert. When he hatched, the first face Maddie saw was that of Chaz and she quickly became attached to him, the latter taking care of his training afterwards. She was then placed in the Sydney zoo's reptile house where Chaz worked, growing up there and meeting Zoe the Thorny devil, Nigel the scorpion and Frank the spider who became her closest friends.
===Back to the Outback===
On the day of her first performance, Maddie remains discreet in her vivarium until Chaz comes looking for her with the flattering advice of showing her fangs to audiences to adore her. Placed in a crate, Maddie can't wait for everyone to love her but the second she pops her fangs the audience is terrified and Chaz proceeds to describe her as a monstrous slayer, much to the shock of Maddie who is then treated of monster by a woman whose baby she unintentionally scared off.
Brought back to the vivarium, Maddie remains devastated by the cruel treatment of humans, calling herself a hideous monster. Jackie the Crocodile tries to explain to him that she is special on the inside like her three friends but nothing to do, Maddie remains obviously depressed that she will never be loved like Pretty Boy the Koala. Jackie then evokes the Outback, the place where she comes from and where the species of the quartet live together, amazed Maddie. As Zoe, Nigel and Frank fall asleep, Jackie assures Maddie that the next shows will be better for her, which the Snake doesn't seem to really believe.
The following days were no better for Maddie, however, as she was continually treated like a wild beast and thrown into a crate at the end of each show. When Jackie is kicked out of the zoo after everyone believed she was attacking a fallen Chazzy in her enclosure, a saddened Maddie who couldn't stand this life any longer offers her friends to escape the zoo tonight and go to the Outback. Faced with their reluctance, Maddie convinces them to turn their backs on the despicable treatment of humans that will never stop and to find their families in the Outback who will love them as they really are inside.
With Zoe opening the vivariums, the four friends sneak discreetly under the guards' noses until they find themselves in Pretty Boy's enclosure who immediately tries to get them to be spotted by tapping on one of his toys in the tree. Maddie first tries to reason with him gently but realizing that he has no respect for them, she climbs the tree to stop him just so Nigel sting the koala's butt, knocking him out and doing fell on the other side of the zoo. After jumping, Maddie and her friends rush out to sea, dragging Pretty Boy with them so that he doesn't warn anyone at least as far as town.
The group then crosses over to a bird's nest and as they gaze at the stars, they panic when they see a shark approaching them. Pretty Boy regains consciousness and has an argument with Maddie before the marine predator emerges from the water to turn out to be just a friendly female shark named Jacinta who is also a member of the U.S.S. (Uglies Secret Society), a group of animals misunderstood due to being seen as freaks, who will step in to help the Leaking Five whenever they say the password. Jacinta then takes the group to the Sydney shore in the early morning hours.
After saying goodbye to Jacinta, Pretty Boy separates from the gang with his usual condescension, leaving the quartet to quietly advance through the town until a furious mob chases the koala out as they believes he has rage. Cornered all over the place by humans, Maddie tries vainly to reason with them and slaps Pretty Boy when he tries to deliver her to save his own skin. The gang manages to make it out after Maddie has had time to say the password, involving redback spiders who lead the escapees into the sewers through the manhole they were standing on.
As they moves through the sewers, the tape is then transported through the pipes that the fugitives end up appreciating unlike the frightened koala until it is expelled to the surface on a window washer platform. Chased by Chaz and Chazzy, they escape by grabbing an ice cream truck that stops next to a school. In the classroom, they meet two duck toads that Maddie releases from their cage and learn from them that the school buses are passing towards the Outback. They first hang on to the wrong bus, but Zoe's idea allows them to climb onto the roof of the right vehicle.
Later, the reptiles and arachnids happily take in the scenery before they begin to question what a family really is, to which Maddie says it looks like people who love each other for who they are. really. Their little tender moment is interrupted by Chaz, forcing the gang to get inside the bus and hide among the children frightened by them. After Pretty Boy is thrown by a Chaz warning the children of their dangerousness, the foursome manage to get off the bus with the help of a girl who can see that they are not bad.
Crashing into Pretty Boy while falling off a cliff, Maddie and the koala argue again, the snake having enough of the mammal's nastiness and her urge to return to the never-ending zoo while criticizing each other for their different lifestyles, ending with Pretty Boy laughing at Maddie's suggestion to be more than cute, much to Maddie's annoyance. Chaz then accidentally stumbles upon them, capturing Maddie under a piece of wood as the other three fall into a crevice blocked by the zookeeper's hat. Shocked by Chaz on the verge of reassuring Maddie, Pretty Boy utters the password and three Tasmanian Devils tumble to the rescue of the gang, scaring Chaz away. Now guided by their savior, Maddie takes the opportunity to tell Pretty Boy that his act proves he no longer hates her, although Pretty Boy continues to claim otherwise.
Successively directed towards the Outback by the Tasmanian devil, bats, dung beetles, bushpigs and a platypus through the wilderness, the gang stops for the night not far from Ayers Rock after three weeks of walking. As she gazes at the stars, Maddie thinks of Jackie and how happy she would have been to be here with them. She then sings her childhood song to her friends, putting them to sleep with the exception of Pretty Boy. The koala and the snake begin to bond and then Maddie admits to feeling betrayed by Chaz since she believed he cared for her before seeing that she was just another monster for his show. However, she puts her past behind her, thinking only of the better life that awaits them.
The next day, the gang passes by a koala tree that Pretty Boy quickly joins without even saying goodbye to the others, offending Maddie even though she ends up trying to hide that she will miss the koala very much. The four friends finally reach the Outback at dusk, meeting other members of their species there but without their being able to take advantage of it, Chaz disembarks from a biker gang to capture them. While Zoe, Frank and Nigel are captured, Maddie accidentally runs into Chazzy who first gets scared of her and then finally sees that she has nothing monstrous. Unfortunately, Chaz takes the opportunity to grab Maddie and lock her in a glass cage. Guilty, Chazzy knocks their cages off the jeep to free them but manages only with Maddie. She broke down in grief and cried as she blamed herself in losing her friends. Later Maddie enlists the help of the other animals but they are all too terrified of the Outback's exterior to intervene. Joined by Pretty Boy having realized he was better with her. He manages to convince her that they can go save their three friends, resulting in an awkward hug from Maddie to Pretty Boy.
After stealing a fire engine, the duo catches up with Chaz on full swing. While Pretty Boy takes on the bikers, Maddie walks up the ladder lying down to reach the moving jeep where Nigel apologizes for taking Maddie away from her family, only for Maddie to declare them her family. The trio then freed themselves thanks to Nigel's shrill cries and after taking a sidecar motorcycle, the gang fled through a ravine. Always pursued, they receive the invaluable help of the animals of the Outback. 
The dung beetles throw enormous balls of earth from the heights which provoke the pilings of all the vehicles and the gang finds themselves in spite of themselves on the edge of a cliff on the firefighter's ladder like a seesaw with Chazzy suspended above emptiness. When Maddie tries to help the boy, Chaz calls her a monster again, prompting Maddie to confront him by fully identifying herself as a poisonous snake while stating that she is not a monster before biting into Chaz's bracelet to act as a rope at the other end of the ladder (showing who she actually is) that Chaz just has to pull to bring up Chazzy and Pretty Boy before the ladder falls into the void.
In the stampede, Maddie molts and Pretty Boy finds her even more beautiful. Chaz then makes peace with the five animals for having saved his son, especially towards Maddie whom he sees again as the baby snake that he once found while thanking her from the bottom of his heart. The gang then return to the Outback where they are greeted as heroes by their fellows get reunite happily with Jackie, who start the agency, and finally settles in their new home after such a long misadventurous journey.
==Quotes==
==Trivia==
*Throughout the film, Maddie sometimes wants and seems to interact with humans even if they don't understand what she is saying, but only the Indigenous girl (named Norine in the credits) seems to understand her a little bit. It likely was done to show the spiritual connection between the Australian land and the Indigenous people, its natural human nation.
*Maddie has a song called Maddie's Lullaby which is similar to the titular song of the 2014 movie Song of The Sea, 
**Saoirse and Her both sing their songs about their mothers (ex. Her mom, Bronagh)
**Both have been played twice
**Both have to do with water (Sea, and rain)
*Maddie being called the most dangerous animal in the world is an exaggeration because even though they are the most poisonous, Inland taipan are only known to attack if provoked and their death rate in humans is very weak compared to other.
*It has been theorized that Maddie has childhood abandonment issues. Possibly stemming from her being seperated from her mother as a child, Some argue this is evident by her inital longing to impress Chaz. And the fact that her being called hidious by him crushed her emotionaly. She then later got quickly attached to Pretty Boy, but near the end when he leaves the group briefly she tries to dismiss him.
**She is also the most emotional character in the movie because she cried more than others - 4 times of all movie (5 if we include her depression after first show).
*Maddie had some differences from real taipans:
**Maddie is blue, unlike her peers, who are olive brown like in real life.
**Like most snakes in fiction, Maddie has hearing, whereas in real life no species of snake is able to hear, only to feel vibrations in the ground. Real snakes also don't have eyelids so they can't blink.
**She also cries in the movie when real taipans can't shed tears in emotional distress. Rather to dry out their own eyes. 
*Maddie seems to be not short for the name Maddison but rather "Medusa" - a serpentine figure from Greek mythology who was also maligned by the masses for her lack of beauty, and who also left human civilization to live out in the wild. Before being chased by a legendary hunter, Maddie's fate was a lot nicer than her Greek counterpart however.
*Jennifer Aniston, Jodi Benson, Sarah Vowell, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jessalyn Gilsig, Julianne Moore, Kate Winslet, Rebecca Romijn, Marcia Cross, Joan Cusack, Meg Ryan, Taylor Dooley and Tara Strong were all considered to voice Maddie before Isla Fisher was cast.
==External Links==
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*Maddie on the Guile Hero wiki
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