Last Showing Thursday, December 8Happy Feet Two (PG)
Click to view the Trailer.
By Thomas Leupp, Hollywood.com
Synopsis: In the 2006 animated blockbuster Happy Feet, an alienated emperor penguin named Mumbles found empowerment through tap-dancing, and in so doing managed to both attract a mate and stop the overfishing that imperiled his Antarctic habitat. Directed by George Mitchell – the same George Mitchell who gave us the post-apocalyptic Mad Max trilogy and the almost despairingly bleak Babe: Pig in the City – Happy Feet paired its broadly conventional narrative with a darker sensibility not often seen in talking-animal fare.
The film’s sequel, Happy Feet Two, finds Mitchell (co-directing with Gary Eck) both more jovial and more easily distracted. The story begins straightforwardly enough, with Mumbles (Elijah Wood), now grown-up and by all appearances well-adjusted, ceding the mantle of self-discovery to his son, Erik (Ava Acres). Boogie fever has swept the once dance-averse penguin nation, but in a cruelly ironic twist, Erik has inherited none of his father’s nifty moves.
As before, Happy Feet Two features a variety of buoyant song-and-dance numbers, with Alecia Moore (aka P!nk), lending her formidable pipes to spirited re-workings of “Rhythm Nation” and “Under Pressure,” among others. Robin Williams returns for double duty as both Ramon, a diminutive, oversexed Latin lover, and Lovelace, a fiery Southern-preacher type. (Lovelace later adopts a Rastafarian dialect, allowing Williams to achieve the rare culture-caricature trifecta.) His voracious scenery-devouring is all the more impressive given the grandeur of the scenery. Not to be left out of the quasi-Vaudevillian comic shenanigans, Hank Azaria lays on a thick Scandinavian shtick as Sven, a charismatic Arctic émigré who presents himself as the only penguin in the world who can fly. Azaria is a hoot, but the film’s best moments come courtesy of the cast’s highest-profile additions, Matt Damon and Brad Pitt, voicing Bill and Will (respectively) two tiny krill in search of meaning at the bottom of the food chain.
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