I just got back from seeing “Happy Feet” with a couple of little kids. It was a strange mix of pop culture music references, hallucinating penguins going insane in jail, eco-messages about pollution and overfishing, and I think some kind of commentary about art and culture and globalization. Really, I’m not making this up. You thought it was a cute movie about dancing penguins finding their “heartsongs”? No…

First of all the penguin flips out in the zoo exhibit and whatever happens from that moment on has the horribly insincere moment of the move Brazil or that Ambrose Bierce story about the guy imagining his escape from execution in the seconds while he’s strangling to death.

Then there is a perturbing subtext to the way the penguins escape starvation. As the dour penguin religious patriarchs sing their ominous gregorian chant from the looming clifftops, and the outcast penguin who comes back from the dead yelling about alien abductions freaks out dancing around with a frenetically beeping radio antenna box sticking out of his spine like something out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, advocating rebellion and the overthrow of all his native cultural values, and the helicopter thumps in scarily and unloads its cargo of astronaut-snow-suited “aliens” and the penguins all begin to tap dance in synch with each other, and the “aliens” point, laugh, take photos, and then clumsily imitate the dancing…

The message really gets hammered home – when you come into contact with a more powerful culture that doesn’t speak your language, learn to dance and entertain them, or you won’t get any more fish.

Oh, and also, if you are going insane in captivity, art helps to pass the time. I’ll try to remember that one for when the alien abductions happen.

There was a montage of politicians arguing in the United Nations, and protesters in the streets, and a map with fishing fleets scooting away from Antarctica, to explain what had happened.

What a strange movie! It was kind of cool – but not what I expected.

I think I have to approve of it as a movie that suggested (in the 30 seconds of the photo-montages) that political action might actually be an effective option for change. (Rather than individual heroism and romantic love making everything happen.)

Being me, I also noticed the gendering of the penguins – the female penguins have hourglass shapes accentuated by the curving of the black patches on their backs. And the yellow patches on their chests are shaded so that the female penguins look like they have cleavage, and the male penguins have broad manly chests. It wasn’t as dumb as the gender & sexuality of the ants in The Ant Bully, but it was still interesting to note how very much the movie industry thinks that people need baby female penguins to be sexy.

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