Come Here, Sausage

The movie itself would have been infinitely better had it been 90 minutes of this. And indeed, the mid-film dance-tacular set to "Boogie Wonderland" was FANTASTIC. And better yet, came free of the queasiness I felt by the final dance-tacular.

Because sadly, the makers of Happy Feet put in this thing called "plot". Wherein the sheer ridiculous glory of dancing penguins is muted by a Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer-type protagonist + questionable ethnic stereotypes + thrown-in & hastily concluded globally conscious message + a lot of sex(ual innuendo). Really. All the penguins except hapless Mumble are pretty much just trying to get laid, whether via song or pebble. However natural penguin booty may be, I maintain that it is still somewhat disturbing when a movie opens with the main character's mother singing Prince's "Kiss" ("I just want your body baby/From dusk til dawn") & segueways into "Let's talk about eggs baby/Let's talk about you & me". Penguins!

Although I must admit it was way more adorable than it should have been to see a baby penguin getting down to the sound of "The Message". Actually, the soundtrack overall was commendably selected, given the film's magnitude.

In conclusion, I'm almost ashamed to say I was half-hoping that since they took it to the "bad humans" level, they were going to give us some hot penguin sweater action. Seriously, if this movie had been made in the 90s it would have been all oil spill badness rather than oh nos we's overfishing badness & then, maybe, we woulda got the sweaters. Although I understand that technically the sweaters are generally used for fairy penguins, not emperors, they could have gotten away with it.

Plus, the only possible competition for penguin-dancing cuteness is penguin-sweater cuteness. If they had combined the two I probably would have died of the cute.