“happy feet” blames the penguins

Clementine and I went to the dollar theater not so long ago and saw the animated children’s film “Happy Feet.” I don’t want to spend a lot of time on it here, especially if no one else has seen it, but I’m curious to know if anyone else out there thought that, in a way, it shifted the responsibility onto the penguins for the environmental issues that are presently degrading their habitats. Am I the only one who was left with the impression that if penguins would just get off their lazy feathered asses and learn to entertain us then they’d be fine?

For those of you that haven’t see the movie, there’s this one little penguin that, unlike all his fellow penguins, can’t carry a tune at all. Instead, as it turns out, he’s a great dancer. Really. He’s good. But no one else appreciates his talent. In fact, being superstitious, they blame him for the fact that there haven’t been as many fish to eat lately. They think he’s angered their god. Anyway, he sets out to prove them wrong. And, sure enough, he finds whitey up there pumping his oil and over-fishing the hell out of the ocean. (And, by “whitey” I mean “the man.” I realize that white people aren’t the only ones ruining international waters. I just like the way “whitey” sounded there. It had a nice ring to it.) So, one thing leads to another, he gets thrown into a zoo, and things look bleak… Until, he starts blowing people away with his dancing! In an instant, crews are dispatched to find his fellow penguins, to see if they, like him, know how to hoof like mother fuckers. Fortunately, our friend the penguin gets to them first and teaches them what to do. And then, boom, they become an international cause d’celeb. School kids start writing to their heads of state demanding that we stop over-fishing their waters, polluting, and all the rest of it, and, before you know it, everything’s fixed. The dancing penguin, who everyone hated and shunned, has saved their society.

This is an aside, but isn’t it much more likely that if we discovered a colony of hoofing penguins that people would just start bugging their local zoos, asking them to go out and, “catch a few”?

Anyway, it’s a nice story and all, and it’s great that they’re getting kids to think about the effects of their actions on the natural world, but I think there’s this “fucking lazy, unimaginative penguin” undercurrent that runs through it. It may not be a perfect analogy, but imagine a cartoon about a quirky Jewish kid growing up in a Nazi concentration camp whose dancing (assuming his fellow captives were willing learn the steps) so impresses the guards that the final solution grinds to a halt. I know I probably don’t need to ask this, but wouldn’t that be offensive? Isn’t it bullshit, regardless of how well intentioned it is, to suggest that these creatures (I’m talking about penguins again) have it within their power to stop global warming, and all the rest of it, but just aren’t clever enough to pull it off?

And I do realize that, all things considered, it’s probably a good movie. I think it’s great that kids are learning about the over-fishing of arctic waters, global warming and pollution. I just wish that I they could have done it in such a way so as not to trigger my obsessive compulsive button. (How about a Rambo-like, badass penguin that hunts down and assassinates the heads of multi-national corporations? Now, that I might be able to get behind.)