In one word...Eh...Not too bad. Its just not what I would call good. Uuhhh...where to start...

There are 4 main characters, but the giraffe and hippo take the back seat, so they are boring and don't really have much of a purpose and I really didn't like the character designs. The story didn't do much for me either, it was entertaining in a sense, but just didn't have any substance. The humour wasn't anything special at all, even though I found penguins very amusing.

Its just a movie that everyone remembers for the "MOVE IT" song. Nothing special, but your kids might like it.

It took me a while to get around to seeing Madagascar. There are so many animated movies coming out these days that it really is hard to work one's way down the list. As evidenced by the reviews that came before mine, I wasn't expecting a Must-See flick, but I wasn't expecting a total bomb either.

As predicted, Madagascar was neither. It's a middle of the road entity that didn't make me feel like I'd just lost an hour and a half of my life... but isn't something I would rush out and tell people to see either.

I liked the character designs although I did find them a little distracting at times... same sort of thing with the animation... personally I think if they had dialed back the 'pop' factor a bit, it would've made the scenes that pushed it even funnier... but maybe that's just me.

And speaking of pop... some of the pop culture stuff was funny, but some of it just felt flat... excessive...

***SPOILER WARNING***

I do have to give it brownie points however for being not exactly the movie I was expecting... I knew that the zoo animals were going to be dumped in the wild... I knew there was a lion, a zebra, a giraffe and a hippo... but I kinda figured it would be like most animated films with anthropomorphized animals--everybody plays nice and we ignore the normal rules of the animal kingdom. Thus it was a bit of a surprise that the plot took a turn around the 30min mark from "get the animals to Madagascar" to "let's acknowledge the fact that a lion and a zebra wouldn't normally be best friends"... it was a bit of a surprise when Alex started fantasizing about Marty being dinner.

Finally the ending... I'm with Inkwolf on this one... the animals have the opportunity to return to the wild but choose to go back to their cages in New York? What the--?! The fact that we discover in the end that they couldn't in fact go back didn't matter... it was just this idea that after all they'd been through, this was what they would choose...

bleh. not exactly the feel-good, lift me from my seat moment I was looking for.

A much better film than Shark Tale.
Although Madagascar is a little too full of pop culture references instead of its own wit, it is a pretty enjoyable film. The animation is pretty spiffy. Instead of opting for Discovery Channel-realistic animal characters, or creepy quasi-realistic-human-animal-mutants a la Shark Tale, the animators at Dreamworks give us nifty, highly stylized characters. It's basically the cast of Seinfeld in the jungle, and a whole lot of fun.
Although all of the characters are great, King Julian the flambuoyant lemur king steals the show.
Definitely worth renting, at least.

Well, this film is hard to review on several levels.

For pure animation, I liked the cartoony characters, but somehow the lion's square fingers kept snapping me out of the fantasy every time I noticed them.

Second, the plot and characters. I think to love this movie you have to either be a New Yorker or in love with NY-ness. If, like me, New York City is one of the last places you could be induced to visit, you are not going to find this film cosy. The gung-ho penguins are the funniest thing in the film, but they would have been even better if Jack Nicholson impersonations hadn't already been done to death in cartoons, A few of the character voices were, frankly, from the list of people who've done so many cartoons I'm sick of hearing them. (A growing peeve of mine. You'd think there were only thirty or so voice actors in Hollywood.)

But I think that the film was hurt worst of all by its social commentary, intended or not.

MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD

Some of the most successful movies act as idealized mirrors of our times. The Wizard of Oz's message was "There's no place like home" on the farm, when hordes of people were leaving home for the cities. If Dorothy had suddenly said, "Why am I doing this? I have all you good friends here, and the Emerald City is fabulous! I'm staying!" it might have been a more accurate reflection of the times, but much less popular. Even then, everyone knew that cities are puss-filled pimples on the face of the earth...that's why the suburbs keep spreading.

So, let's look at Madagascar in the light of post-9-11 America. A bunch of animals THINK they want freedom, and they attain it, and others are forced along through no choice of their own. When they get there, though, it turns out freedom is dangerous, inconvenient and scary. You have to fend for yourself and think for yourself. The big happy ending is when they decide to run back to being caged...only the lunatic gung-ho types choose to stay free, and the one sensible protagonist who actually wants freedom chooses to give it up to go along with the crowd. Just as we are allowing our constitutional protections and freedoms be taken away in the name of security--back into the cages we go!

It may reflect the times accurately, but we know in our hearts it's the wrong decision, just as we know in our hearts that the animals made the wrong choice at the end. The fact that the boat is out of fuel is all that saves the movie's ending.

(I also fail to see, in a world of talking animals, how eating fish is morally superior to eating zebra. Maybe because you don't know the fish personally?)

What is it with Dreamworks? It's another 'kids' film filled with crude humour, endless pop culture and film references (including at least three - Hawaii Five-0, Planet of the Apes and Chariots of Fire - all on one the one 'set'), and a character who talks like Eddie Murphy - and yet with all this, and its PG rating indicating that it's clearly not aimed at kids (or at least not specifically at kids), why do we have to have this "carnivores are bad, m'kay'" rubbish to protect us from the terrible truth that lions eat meat? Geez, even 'The Lion King' acknowledged that 12 years ago.

This film has all my usual CGI gripes. Everything looks like rubber, and I just feel myself longing to see a pencil-mark. The plot is pretty dreary. It certainy has potential, but this is basically squandered. It's more like, "Ok, we put these zoo animals on a tropical island. Err... and they do something funny. We'll work that out later."

Actually not all the humour fell flat. I think I actually laughed twice. And the characters aren't completely unlikeable (well, the giraffe comes close), but to me this fails in two major areas. It was a decent idea without much in the way of follow-up thinking, and the adult and kids elements didn't mesh together like they do in a good feature. They interrupted and interferred with each other.

On the plus side, it IS better than 'Shark Tale, but than again, so is botulism.

I notice from the trailers that Dreamworks' next two features both include belching jokes. I'm not sure that I can wait.

Hmm, let's see. The fur isn't very convincing. Sometimes the 3D characters look more like 2D. The skin texture reminds me of plasticine. Alex's "steak" looks like a rubber chew toy. And on top of that, the story is one of the more weightless and contrived ever in an animated movie.

On the plus side, I can't get that "I like to move it" song out of my head, and the characters are generally likeable and the humor is actually pretty funny.

But Finding Nemo aside, just ONCE I'd like to see an animated movie like Bambi or The Fox and the Hound where the animals acted more or less like animals.

I wasn't planning on even renting this film when it came to DVD, but most of my friends had gone to see the movie and said it was great. So I finally broke down and watched it in theaters. I was pleasently surprised that it wasn't as stupid as the trailers made it appear.

The story was semi-predictable, but there were a few twists in it that weren't expected. The main characters weren't very strong, but they were ok. I think the giraffe had the most character of the four main ones, but it was the penguins and lemur king that made the movie. If it hadn't been for those characters the movie would have been pretty flat.

The animation was a typical 3-d animated film. I don't really care for the style everything was animated in. Although it was a more cartoonish style it was too square in my opinion.

The voice cast was pretty good. The original score, what little there was there, was pretty good, but most of it was just remixes of older film score tracks. And although they sounded good, it would have been nice to hear something new from Zimmer. The film also had several disco songs in it, there were only two songs I really enjoyed the others were just annoying or repetative.

Overall it's a fun movie. It has some great humor in it and some of the side characters are very entertaining. It's worth at least a couple rents.

Loved it. It's the only DreamWorks CG film I would pay to see twice. And I did.

Abysmal. There is just nothing to recommend here. The plot is shallow (animals escape, learn to bond, decide to go back). The humor is groan-inducing (a pair of underpants falls on the giraffe's face, he exclaims "underpants!"... that's the whole joke). The only potential saving grace are the penguins, but the supporting cast amounts to nothing without strong leads, and we surely don't have strong leads here. The character designs are rather unpleasant, the perpetual physical comedy unamusing, and the voice acting devoid of energy or even sincerity (save maybe the giraffe). I admittedly am not a fan of Dreamworks animation, but tried (and succeeded, I believe) in entering this one unbiased, but it is simply dull and lifeless. All the demerits of Shrek 2 amplified, minus any of the merits.

Definatly Dreamwork's best CG animated feature. Better than Antz and Shrek 1 and 2 (never saw Shark Tale, don't want to).
I loved the cartoony look to the characters and the newly added squash and stretch.
Good job Dreamworks! KEEP UP the good work!