Mania Grade: B

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Info:

• Starring the Voices of: Elijah Wood, Pink, Robin Williams, Hank Azaria, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Hugo Weaving
• Written by: George Miller
• Directed by: George Miller
• Studio: Warner Bros.
• Rating: PG
• Run Time: 99 minutes
• Series:

Mania Review: Happy Feet Two

Happy Feet Two
© Warner Bros/Robert Trate

 Wow, they did it again!

The original Happy Feet represents one of the biggest cinematic rope-a-dopes of recent years. It showed every sign of soulless corporate product based around a supremely bad idea. Dancing penguins delivering environmental messages? Avian Elvis and Marilyn impersonators? Robin Williams in multiple roles? Make the madness stop! And yet somehow from that miserable oyster, George Miller spun a tasty and enduring cinematic stew that effortlessly accomplished all of its lofty goals.  Now comes the sequel, also helmed by Miller, and it actually manages to play the same trick twice. More or less.

Ominous warning signs appear in the film’s trailer. A pair of krill serve as prominent characters, the surprisingly terrific dancing and singing are toned down, and the same basic environmentalist message lends the impression of regurgitation rather than advancement. Happy Feet Two also suffers from sky-high expectations it can’t hope to match. But within those confines, it still finds enough freshness and excitement to justify a return to the well.

Once more we journey to the Antarctic, where Mumble (voiced by Elijah Wood) and Gloria (voiced by Alecia Moore AKA Pink) have a newly hatched chick named Erik. Existential dilemmas run in the family, it seems, and since Erik can’t dance like his father can, he wonders about his place in the universe.  He and his friends eventually set off to find their purpose, with Mumble in hot pursuit. That lets them miss the fireworks when global warming releases a huge slab of ice that traps the remainder of the colony in their valley home. The free need a find a way to get the other penguins out before they starve to death.

Writer-director George Miller struggles the merge all of the pieces together here, though the third-act climax heals a great deal of damage in that regard. But the first film had a tendency to wander as well, and Happy Feet Two ensures we have a delightful group of guides along the way. Mumble has evolved as a character but Wood hasn’t lost his charming pluck, as he navigates hostile waters, faces down relentless carnivores, and does a solid for a chunky elephant seal (Richard Carter) that may pay off kharmically before the end. Miller intersperses that with the tale of Bill and Will the Krill (voiced by Brad Pitt and Matt Damon) who set out to discover their individuality and whose paths invariably cross with Mumble’s time and again.  

The gorgeous vistas of the Antarctic retain their beauty here, as in the first film, and the penguins’ stocky bodies actually work with the film’s motion-capture technology far better than human figures. Miller leans on that heavily in attempting to navigate the storyline, punctuated by clever dialogue upon which the high-caliber cast can feast.  Happy Feet Two quickly recaptures the brightness and whimsy of its predecessor, then uses it to toboggan around obstacles both big and small.

The worst of the flaws entails Bill and Will, who are quite amusing, but also look really creepy and whose purpose in the overall narrative makes little sense until the very end. For most of the film, they act like a twenty-minute short inadvertently spliced into the main feature, a fact that distracts us more than it should. The musical elements sag in the middle as well. While the first Happy Feet felt like a wintry version of Moulin Rouge, this one loses confidence in that premise and abandons it midway through. Awkward original songs clash with variation on old favorites, preventing the soundtrack from finding an even tone. It eventually recovers with a rousing finale, but the results lend it a sense of disjointedness that needn’t have been there. (Come on guys, you’ve got Pink on the payroll! You need to use her more than this!) 

Many of us suspected such problems going in and braced for disaster. The surprising thing is that the film shoulders those burdens with ease and even thrives under them in its own way. It can’t match the original, but it’s not the first sequel to fail on that front, and it still offers plenty of fun and enjoyment in compensation. If lightning doesn’t quite strike twice, it comes close enough to evoke the same feelings… still taking the franchise far beyond what anyone could have expected from it.