Bait and switch

Happy Feet jumps into some surprisingly angry territory | John Dawson

Previews for Happy Feet give moviegoers no idea what they are in for. For half of the one-hour, 40-minute flick, Happy Feet (rated PG for mild peril and rude humor) behaves like a traditional children's animated film. It's beautiful. It's filled with talking animals. It's cute, although somewhat nonsensical. But with about 40 minutes remaining, Happy Feet takes a most displeasing turn—one so harsh and unnecessary, parents should avoid taking children to the film.

At first Australian filmmaker George Miller's Happy Feet seems like a digitized musical version of the hit documentary March of the Penguins. Miller uses March's basic survival plot to set up his tale of one Emperor Penguin that can't sing (a mating prerequisite in Miller's imagined land). Though the muted bird, appropriately named Mumble, can tap dance, he's ostracized from the group. Apart from his kind in Antarctica, Mumble survives a few scares but eventually meets a group of smaller, somehow more Latino, penguins. After a few wacky adventures with the group of smaller penguins, Mumble and his musical gang encounter the dreaded and feared humans.