The plot seemed a little dicey too: yet another story about a outsider penguin, this time non-dancing little Erik (Ava Acres), the pipsqueak progeny of Happy Feet’s tap-dancing’ star Mumble and his wife Gloria (voiced and sung by Pink, replacing the late Brittany Murphy) and about Erik’s attempt to find his place in a world full of vast dancing ensembles of emperor penguins, along with surly elephant seals, con artist puffins, and globally warmed ice-walls that go sliding off into the sea, trapping everybody on an ice and snow island with no food supply.

Like the first Happy Feet, which angered some anti-ecology types, Happy Feet Two has a strong pro-ecology theme, triggered by all that melting Antarctica ice. It says that all of us — penguins and we contentious humans too — have to pull together to survive: a message that should actually appeal to lots of us, and apparently did the last time out — except possibly anyone who might be mightily miffed by the movie’s global warming angle, and possibly by the sympathy shown to Latino penguins like fiery Ramon (Robin Williams), none of whom are deported to the South Pole.

Oh, and then there’s the two krill, Will the Krill (Brad Pitt) and Bill the Krill (Matt Damon), who break away from their swarm in the ocean and try to follow their dream (or Will’s dream that is, since Bill is a Will-follower), while engaging in pun-strewn badinage that includes the not-quite-priceless “one in a krillion.” There’s Mighty Sven the flying penguin, voiced by Hank Azaria in a pseudo-Scandinavian accent that reminded me a little of actor John Qualen‘s immortal “By Yabber! By Yimminy!” Swedes for John Ford. And did I say that Little Erik gets to sing a Puccini aria, like Pavarotti? (From “Tosca,” yet.)

All of that may sound overly complicated and pretty confusing and possibly annoying, especially for a feature cartoon that will count many simple pleasure-seeking tots among its audience. But, since I liked Happy Feet One so much, I stuck it out, contented myself with a few stray “wows” at the movie‘s incredible technical feats. And when Feet Two began to get really good — in the krill scenes and the one where Erik and his chums face a growly old elephant seal named Bryan the Beachmaster (very well voiced by Richard Carter) I was ready to enjoy myself. And I did.

By the way, when I began to warm up to Happy Feet Two (not globally, but emotionally), I also decided that Pitt and Damon, miscast as they both might initially seem as krill, actually do a great job playing lowest-food-chain organisms. , I tell you, these two guys: They krilled me. But, after all, they do both work in an industry where it’s krill or be krilled. (Okay, I’ll stop. But they don‘t.)

Richard Corliss was right. The animation is splendid, the music is peachy, the voice actors are keen, especially Carter and Azaria and Pink. (Not that Corliss uses adjectives like “peachy” and “keen.” But Happy Feet Two, however rotten-tomatoed it might have been, is yet another feature cartoon that should please most adults more than many adult movies. Unless, of course, you are one of the anti-Global Warming crowd (or maybe, I should say one of the pro-Global Warming crowd) who become violently offended at the Happy Feet saga’s strong environmental messages

That would, of course include commentator Glenn Beck, who, on his old prime time cable TV commentary show, occasionally went into purple-faced rants about Happy Feet and global warming, and the alleged Marxist propaganda fueling both. Now, I would think if there was anyone on Earth in whose wayward footsteps a movie critic of any political persuasion would not want to follow, it’s the tantrum-tossing Beck — a guy, by the way, whose two favorite movies are the liberal screen and TV writer Rod Serling’s Planet of the Apes (the Charlton Heston version) and Tango and Cash, which was directed by a Russian, Andrei Konchalovsky. I also think the various Happy Feet conspiracy theories, much like the Shakespeare-was an illiterate-murderer-and-the-Earl-of-Oxford-wrote-all-his-plays theory espoused by Roland Emmerich’s godawful stinker Anonymous, is pretty silly.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 
•