Happy Feet is one of the films created to cash in on the success of March of the Penguins. The show is about Mumble. Every Emperor penguin has a "heart song" used to attract a mate. Mumble is a horrible singer, but is an excellent dancer. When a fish shortage strikes, Mumble is singled out as the cause. Mumble decides to find the true source of the fish shortage to help the other penguins.

The story is all right, but they seem to start losing focus near the end. The movie starts out being about be true to oneself, but ends with a message about the environment. The movie gets slow at certain parts. I can't single out anything that could've been shortened or removed, but I'm sure they're there. The ending was pretty bad, with the solution for the character's problems being pulled out of the proverbial hat.

The animation itself was top notch. Despite the challenges of animating a place like Antartica, they managed to pull it off quite well. Also, they made the interesting choice of using real actors in the movie instead of animating the characters. Surprisingly, it worked quite well.

The music in the movie is great. Among the big names that wrote the songs used in the film are The Beatles, Queen, Elvis Presley, Stevie Wonder, and Prince. The dance routines were excellent. Tony winner Savion Glover did a wonderful job dancing for Mumble.

I'd say that the movie is at least worth a rental. Despite the problems with the story, I enjoyed the film quite a bit.

Well, when I heard about this film and saw one of the original trailers for it online, I was awwed by the utter cuteness of dancing baby penguins . . . that looked realistic. Not knowing what to expect from the storyline (because the film hadn't come out yet), I was curious to see what could possibly be the focus of this adorably cute looking film.

"Happy Feet" is focused on the lives of a large clan of Emperor Penguins of Antarctica, most especially a young penguin named Mumble who is . . . um, not quite your average penguin in terms of being average. While all other penguins have "Heartsongs" - the unique song inside them that helps them attract a lifelong mate - Mumble lacks the ability to sing, but he can tap dance like a master. These differences cause him to be considered as an outcast, a rebel, and most importantly, the main cause of the Emperor Penguins' food shortage in the ocean. He is exiled from his home, where he begins a quest to help his fellow penguins and find the real source of the fish shortage.

I will admit it: the story and characters could have been better, but I found myself tapping my toes to the music throughout the entire film. It was long (almost two hours long), but the music, script, and brillantly dazzling animation in "Happy Feet" keep you interested in Mumble's journey of proving his loyalty to the Penguins he loves, despite being so unpenguin-like. The songs were mostly songs that we've all heard before, but some were altered slightly to fit the creatures and the situations with the penguins' annual courting ritual (and perhaps it's PG rating), so it was an appropriate addition to the storyline of how penguins and real animals couple up.

The voices were great and the messages of the film were clear by the film's conclusion. A marvelous achievement in animation, Happy Feet is a fun film that will leave you dancing out of your seats.

3.5 stars!

Happy Feet was an Academy Award winner as 2006's Best Animated Film. Audiences also enjoyed the film paying $198 million to see it, but part of that could have been due to penguin mania begun by the uncanny success of March of the Penguins a year earlier and continuing to 2007's Surf's Up.

The basic plot involves the notion that most penguins are natural singers, but not Mumble. His daddy dropped him when he was an egg, and somehow that translated into a unique talent for flipper tapping. Mumble can light up the dance floor, but he has a horrible singing voice. Through the movie, he learns to appreciate his uniqueness.

This film had better than expected animation. The Antarctic landscapes are vibrant and beautiful, and the penguins are cute. CG was a good choice for animating these penguin armies as traditional animation of millions of little birds would have been tedious. Additionally, the dance choreography is well animated.

I particularly enjoyed the "latino" penguins, and the love penguin. Also, fearing the worst from Robin Williams, I was pleasantly surprised with his reasonable performance.

As for the story, it is slow and meandering. There are quite a few enjoyable scenes of penguins singing and swimming, but they don't push the story along. The main story finally arrives at about 75 minutes in, and is really lame with an even lamer, out of nowhere, resolution.

So, this film looks good on the outside and is enjoyable in parts, but overall is lacking in the story department. I would say I enjoyed both of the other Academy Award nominees (Cars and Monster House) better. Happy Feet surely won because of its beautiful animation but mostly for its environmental message. Don't get me wrong, I like the environment, but simply having an environmental message should not be reason enough for the award. If you are going to be political, do it well and do not just shoe-horn it in.

So many other films have done the nature thing so much better, particularly films by Studio Ghibli: Princess Mononoke, Naussicaa, Pom Poko, but even Disney did it masterfully with Bambi. Even last year's Over the Hedge had some clever satire on consumption and materialism.

Anyways, sorry for the rant, I just think Happy Feet is undeserving of a Best Picture nod. It is a good looking film with fun moments and cute characters that talk a lot for no real purpose. It will have to be Happy with a B-.

Okay, I get it, we're overfishing. You don't have to beat us over the head with it.

On the DVD for Happy Feet, hidden within the trailers, is a little piece talking about the fish in our oceans, and how we're running out. And thus, the real purpose behind the movie is revealed before the movie begins.

Seriously: if I wanted to watch a movie about environmentalism, I'd watch An Inconvenient Truth. At least I knew what I was going to watch when I went to see it. Happy Feet, though...

Now don't get me wrong. I've rated it three stars because it's not that bad of a movie. I really liked... most of it. There's an amazing scene involving Mumble, Gloria, and "Boogie Wonderland". Many of the songs are integrated well into the movie, the dancing choreography is certainly very impressive, and the story is... almost great. Things are going along fine until the very end when things take a turn for the sublime, kind of like if you go to search for your car and end up finding extraterrestrials.

I won't spoil anything, but I will say that a group of characters make the biggest leap of logic in movie history, and then the movie ends barely five minutes later. The ending felt rushed to me, and that shouldn't have happened. Especially when there are other animated movies that have deliberately thrown in filler to stretch out what little plots they have.

...I'm sorry, I've been griping about this movie, when all I really should've said was, "Just like you rent Snakes on a Plane to see snakes on a plane, Happy Feet's sole purpose is to present penguins singing and dancing (and looking downright sexy at the same time, if I'm allowed to say that) and it does that well." I think I must have put on my cynical pants before I watched this movie.

Wow, this movie had a lot of agendas.

OK, what do you get when you mix excellent animation, pro-gays, anti-Christianity, dancing, secular humanism, environmentalism, and a dash of a few other unnecessary things and put them in a blender?

Actually, the movie was pretty good.

If it hadn't had all those negative elements, I would have totally geeked out over this film. (in fact, I am geeking out on the positive elements.) I don't like to concentrate too much on negative elements, but they still need to be recognized.

1. Secular humanism. This film is riddled with "Be true to yourself" and "You have the song in your heart!" Blech. i would use the barf smiley, if you could use them in your reviews.

2. Pro-gay. Dude, like the entire point of this is the guy isn't like a penguin. He dances instead of sings. I'm not saying dancing is bad. It's just that this is so...obvious. (Shark Tale, anyone?)

3. Anti-Christianity. The "Wisdoms" are obviously off of Christianity. The Great Gwynn is God. It is obvious that the writers don't like Christianity.

Other than that, this movie was awesome. The dancing was so well animated I was thinking, "Why are all these liars saying this is animated?" I loved the Amigos. "My father also told me I was a pitiful loser, and look how I turn out." Classic. The animation...Wow. That is all i will say.

This movie would have a four star review from me if not for the negative elements. Oh, why, why, why?

I almost imagine the producers (change the word for creators, animators or whatever) of "Happy Feet" in the middle of the table of pre-production talking about making a movie about dancing penguins... sure that the chairmen at Warner thougt that it would turn out the holiday blockbuster of the year (and let me remind you this one beat far out the new Bond movie).
Now for the ones who don't know there was a movie that open in 2005, this movie strangely is also about emperor penguins: that broke record ticket sales and won an Academy Award, it was actually a documentary about the hard environment and the complex ritual that this animals have to surpass to raise one single egg...sound familiar?
So yes, the people(and I) didn't exactly care if "Happy Feet" take the same premise to don't know if mock or honor the idea of "March of the Penguins". For some reason I wanted to see this movie of dancin peguins, badly.
I really don't know if it was that incredible hype around the movie or simply because I ended seeing a movie about singing penguins who annoyed a poor penguin just because he can dance, and in the end becomes an ecological tale, but the story of the little Mumble dissapoint me, and a lot.
I seriously think the writers or the director lose the idea in the middle: the message of accepting others because of their values and gifts just gets lost in the punny comedy, the senseless action and the ecological message, and by far the most absurd and forced resolution I have seen in an animation lately...
Still, the numbers don't lie and this may be a failed animation, but is a good "bad animation" (oh god), I mean kids will love it: the music is great (too pop for me, but is enjoyable), the tap choreography will leave you breathless and yes, let's face it this is a CG-cartoon with realistic penguins so you'll know that in the end everyone will be happy and you'll leave the theater in the mood. Am I wrong?
RATE: 3 stars. Hardly, I almost was going for the 2.5, specially since in my country everything know comes dubbed (yiagh!!).

Before I write a review about Happy Feet, I'd just like to say that we should stop kidding ourselves. Happy Feet has absolutely NO story. Oh sure. There's the underlying theme of Mumble, the main adorable penguin, setting out on a quest to find the cause of the declining fish population and all the ecological implications of that. But by the time the movie comes to the end, you've realized it's stretched its point really, REALLY far, to the limits of absolute absurdity.

Take it for what it is. Watching Happy Feet is like watching a good dance troupe production. One glorious, toe-tapping, beat-driven, musical scene after another. And of course there are nuggets of humor and drama sprinkled here and there as icing on the cake. Not to mention some semi-serious themes about racial discrimination and about not being too hard set in your traditions.

I really enjoyed how we finally got an animated movie showing just how harsh the Antarctic can be. This gives the movie a certain something that I felt Ice Age missed. The animation was actually quite good, except for one scene involving killer whales, which actually failed to wow me. It should also be noted that the humans in this movie are real and are actually integrated fairly well into the computer graphics.

The movie itself is really rather silly, but it seems to prove a theory about animation. That if you're computer generated, have great characters, and have lots of singing and dancing, you can almost always get away with having a slim story.

OWMYGOSH!!!!(yes, in this case, my 'Oh' sound like 'Ow') I LOVE THIS MOVIE!!!!!!!!
I went to see this movie with my cousins and was it darn great!!! BABY MUMBLE WAS SO CUTE!!!!!! I just wanna give him a BIIIIG hug!
Ok, I am composed now. The baby penguines were just darling! Ooooo.....so fuzzy....! Singing baby penguines are nice but what can beat dancing baby penguines?! I mean, just look at them! They're darn adorable and huggable! After watching this movie, I wanted to take a tap dancing class(well, actually, I already wanted to learn tap dancing way before I saw this film). Also after watching this movie, I hated, well, no...."hate" is such a dirty word.....maybe abominate...yeah! I abominated the human race even more than before(**coughing : hated**). Just so like us to mooch around nature's turf! We've been doing that since....I don't know when but it was a long time ago! HOW RUDE!!!

Happy Feet really isn’t worth all the hype. I went to this film really hoping it’d be something special; different from the other animated animal films that have come out this year. Yes the animation was spectacular, but the story didn’t match up and I was quite disappointed.

It was different in that it focused on more adult problems than many of the animated films that have come out in the last few years have, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. The main plot didn’t show up until over half through the movie. I found myself getting bored and wondering how much longer the movie was. It picked up the pace near the end though, but that made it feel a bit rushed. It also seemed like the script writers tried to pack in as many messages as they possibly could into the story, too many in my opinion, and with all the subplots it makes the film feel disjointed.

Happy Feet also suffered from a problem most films these days seem to suffer from, good character development. I just couldn’t really feel for any of the characters, as cute as they were, if something bad happened to them it was just oh well. The penguins just seemed to lack depth, and they were almost too human in how they acted. The group of small penguins that latched on to Mumble were pretty amusing and funny at times though. I was impressed by the fact that the majority of jokes weren’t about belching or farting or visuals of penguins getting smashed in the crotch.

This film has undoubtedly some of the best animation I’ve seen in quite a while. From the hundreds of penguins dancing, down to how the downy fluff on the baby penguins moved in the wind it made me want to reach out and pet them. The snow storms almost seem real. It definitely gets major points just for the amazing animation.

On to the music! There’s too many songs and they’re all kind of jumbled together in some scenes, which I found very distracting. I guess I’m too used to Disney where the songs actually pertain to the scene and they all seem to flow nicely. In this film they switch too quickly from one song to the other. Each penguin had it’s own special “HeartSong” which was a neat idea, but the way it was pulled off just didn’t work well in my opinion. Most songs in this movie also had many references to sex, not something I expected to see in a “kids movie”. It would have been nice if there had been songs written specifically for the penguins to sing rather than tossing in overused pop songs. The score was ok, but it was overpowered by the crappy songs.

Lastly, something that has bothered quite a few people, and kind of bugs me too, the advertising. The trailers conveniently left out most of the themes that were slopped into the script. “Save the Environment”, religion is bad, change is good, be different, etc. It would have been nice to have a general idea of what the film was actually about from the trailers. It’s not just a bunch of cute dancing penguins oh no, this film has an agenda.

Overall this film does not live up to the hype. Great animation, but lack of character development and plot brings it down. Maybe worth seeing on the big screen once just for the astounding animation, but I’d ever buy it.

I went to see this movie wanting only one thing--dancing baby penguins. If it delivered that, I would be happy. At which point, I figured I'd probably come back and write a three-star review like most of the "meh" stuff that's being delivered by the CG world these days.

Not so.

This was, hands down, the best animated film I've watched since the Incredibles... and the only four star review I've handed out to a new film since the release of the Incredibles. Four stars to me is 'wow' factor. Great animation. Moving music. Characters that I care about. And then, I need to leave the theatre feeling just... wow.

What elevates "Happy Feet" from the slightly silly idea of 'a penguin who can't sing, but boy can he tap dance'... is the fact that it isn't just about that. Mumble's dancing abilities make him an oddity among his kind and, in the harsh world the antarctic, something that's out of place can get you killed. Only when the penguins are working in harmony can they survive.

That's another thing they don't put a lot of emphasis on in the trailers. This isn't the story of how Mumble wins the heart of the superstar singing penguin, Gloria... if you want to see a lovestory like that go watch "The Pebble and the Penguin"... (actually don't, it's fairly unworthy as a film)... no, this is the story of how the penguins are starving because there are so few fish. The elders blame the food shortage on Mumble's odd ways and exile him. Mumble however barely hears this pronouncement of exile and promises the other penguins that he will find out what is happening to all the fish. THIS is the heart of "Happy Feet"--and in the end, it's Mumble's unique and unorthodox talent that saves everyone.

And, did I mention? Lots of dancing penguins... seriously, the stuff you see in the trailers is just the tip of the iceberg.

Go see this movie.