HAPPY FEET - enviro-agitprop for kids!

HAPPY FEET is a technically superb CGI animated film for kids. The story features a penguin called Mumbles (Elijah Wood) with a gift for tap-dancing but not for singing. This gets him exiled from his clan of Emperor Penguins - his weird dancing schtick is blamed for the worrying lack of fish. Yes, yes. So off he goes to get to the bottom of this problem, bringing happiness to the world through dance and his proto-environmental stance. For this is a kids movie which, much like CARS, has a message. Still, for young kids, the agitprop is not going to get in the way of the cute dancing penguin thing.

I can see how kids would love this movie, but I suspect that for the real tinies, the 1 hour 45 minute run-time might be too long and some of the scarier moments might be too scary. From an adult point of view, there is a sense of wonderment at the sheer technical achievement and some enjoyment of the cheesy sound-track. But we haven't got the wise-ass belly-laugh humour that we got in, say, FLUSHED AWAY. I was less won over by the content - the plot, characterisation, the excessive use of Robin Williams and the Big Message - all basically of mediocre quality. Still, there are worse, more bland kids movies out there, and compared to, say, OPEN SEASON, this movie gets my vote.

HAPPY FEET is on release in Israel, Malaysia, Thailand, the US, the Philippines, Singapore, Brazil, Germany, Austria, Italy, Norway, Poland, Spain, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Argentina, Denmark, Finland, Mexico, Panama, Sweden, the UK and Venezuala. It opens in Latvia this Friday and in Hong Kong, Hungary, South Korea and in Estonia the following weekend. It opens in Australia and Iceland on December 26th. It opens in Egypt and Turkey in January and in Japan in April.