{"id":885,"date":"2006-11-27T11:10:27","date_gmt":"2006-11-27T16:10:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/192.168.1.99:8888\/blog\/2006\/11\/27\/1164643827172.html"},"modified":"2006-11-27T11:10:27","modified_gmt":"2006-11-27T16:10:27","slug":"blogentry-happy-feet-a-truly-epic-animated-dancing-penguin-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.morinfamily.com\/?p=885","title":{"rendered":"[BlogEntry] Happy Feet : A truly epic animated dancing penguin movie"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Took the kids (4 and 2) to see Happy Feet this weekend.&nbsp; IMAX style, which I explained to Katherine simply as, &#034;A zillion times bigger than the movie screen you&#039;re thinking of &#8211; the biggest movie screen in the world.&#034;&nbsp; It was a pretty easy call from the minute I saw the commercials &#8212; just a big ol&#039; mess of animated, dancing and singing penguins.&nbsp; Perfect kids movie.<\/p>\n<p><iframe style=&#034;width: 120px; height: 240px&#034; align=&#034;right&#034; marginwidth=&#034;0&#034; marginheight=&#034;0&#034; src=&#034;http:\/\/rcm.amazon.com\/e\/cm?t=suchstuff-20&amp;o=1&amp;p=8&amp;l=as1&amp;asins=B000EPFFTW&amp;fc1=000000&amp;IS2=1&amp;lt1=_blank&amp;lc1=0000FF&amp;bc1=FFFFFF&amp;bg1=FFFFFF&amp;f=ifr&#034; frameborder=&#034;0&#034; scrolling=&#034;no&#034;><\/iframe> <\/p>\n<p>Ummm&#8230;. not so much.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, it&#039;s an animated dancing and singing penguin movie.&nbsp; But it&#039;s also lots and lots of other things.&nbsp; It&#039;s long.&nbsp; It&#039;s scary.&nbsp; And it&#039;s so crazy over the top political in its environmental message that I&#039;m pretty sure I saw an animated Al Gore in there somewhere near the end.&nbsp; We get it.&nbsp; Humans screw up the food chain.&nbsp; And it will take a miracle,&nbsp;such as thousands of penguins&nbsp;tap dancing, to make people realize that.&nbsp;&nbsp;Perhaps that second part&nbsp;of the message wasn&#039;t what&nbsp;the producers intended, but it comes with the story.<\/p>\n<p>Although the movie is only a little longer than the typical kids movie (I think it still comes in at&nbsp;under 100 minutes), man did they shove alot of movie in here.&nbsp; It&#039;s as if somebody read the basic 36 plots and tried to shove them all in.&nbsp; He&#039;s different from the crowd, so he is shunned.&nbsp; Doesn&#039;t get to play in any penguin games, so to speak.&nbsp; Check.&nbsp; His dad wants him to be what society wants him to be, rather than to be himself, so there&#039;s got to be the falling out and the reconciliation.&nbsp; Check.&nbsp; (This part was the weakest of all the stories, by the way).&nbsp; He&#039;s got to get the girl.&nbsp; This was so obvious that they didn&#039;t even make much of a conflict out of it, it was obvious from the beginning.&nbsp; And he&#039;s got to go on a journey to save everyone.&nbsp; This was the part where it got scary and, quite frankly, depressing.&nbsp; Again I say, &#034;We get it. Humans bad.&nbsp; Animals innocent victims.&#034;&nbsp; It&#039;s hard to say &#034;hero&#039;s journey&#034; while talking about animated penguins, but really, if you see it, you&#039;ll see what I mean.&nbsp; <\/p>\n<p>Here&#039;s a comparison.&nbsp; Did you see the Spielberg A.I. movie?&nbsp; Remember how it just never really ended?&nbsp; How it just kept getting darker and darker and you were never really sure if it was just going to stop on a downer note, or if it was going to circle back around?&nbsp; This movie&#039;s got a bunch of that toward the end.&nbsp; I&#039;m not saying whether it circles back around or not, lest I be accused of spoiling it.<\/p>\n<p>Is it for kids?&nbsp; Maybe a little older than mine. Mine recognize the penguins, they did the plastic toys you can get at Burger King, they watch the commercials and so on.&nbsp; Did they understand the movie?&nbsp; Eh. The 2yr old certainly didn&#039;t.&nbsp; The 4yr old found it mostly scary.&nbsp; But then again she finds all movies scary, including Strawberry Shortcake.&nbsp; She does not like bad guys.&nbsp; And this movie does have a bunch of them.&nbsp; There&#039;s a boatload of scenes where the penguins are chased by scary predators (during such scenes I&#039;m turning to my wife and saying, &#034;Oh come on, do they really have to do this again??&#034;)<\/p>\n<p>Overall, was it enjoyable?&nbsp; Cute.&nbsp; Not as good as I&#039;d hoped.&nbsp; The direction is pretty lousy, if you can say that about an animated movie.&nbsp; Lots of music, though you get the feeling that you never really hear a song from beginning to end.&nbsp; Lots of dancing, but never really any focus on anything other than feet moving so fast you pretty much can&#039;t tell that they&#039;re moving, before cutting away to a scene of thousands of them doing the same thing.&nbsp; The &#034;final battle&#034;, if you can call it that, between the young penguins and the old guard was actually pretty entertaining &#8211; the old penguins do this sort of baritone chant to the &#034;Great Guin&#034;, trying to drown out the music that the young ones are making, and it blends nicely.<\/p>\n<p>This is getting too long.&nbsp; It was a nice, typical Thanksgiving movie.&nbsp; Glad we saw it.&nbsp; Wish it was better.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div class=&#034;wlWriterSmartContent&#034; id=&#034;0767317B-992E-4b12-91E0-4F059A8CECA8:65d3d770-2898-46ce-b2ef-d60b958b08d4&#034; contenteditable=&#034;false&#034; style=&#034;padding-right: 0px; display: inline; padding-left: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; margin: 0px; padding-top: 0px&#034;>Technorati tags: <a href=&#034;http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/movie&#034; rel=&#034;tag&#034;>movie<\/a>, <a href=&#034;http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/review&#034; rel=&#034;tag&#034;>review<\/a>, <a href=&#034;http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/happy%20feet&#034; rel=&#034;tag&#034;>happy feet<\/a>, <a href=&#034;http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/imax&#034; rel=&#034;tag&#034;>imax<\/a>, <a href=&#034;http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/penguins&#034; rel=&#034;tag&#034;>penguins<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Took the kids (4 and 2) to see Happy Feet this weekend.&nbsp; IMAX style, which I explained to Katherine simply as, &#034;A zillion times bigger than the movie screen you&#039;re thinking of &#8211; the biggest movie screen in the world.&#034;&nbsp; It was a pretty easy call from the minute I saw the commercials &#8212; just [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.morinfamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.morinfamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.morinfamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.morinfamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.morinfamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.morinfamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/885\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.morinfamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.morinfamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.morinfamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}