HEROIC FEET

2006’s Happy Feet was a truly crazy movie, a blend of Pixar-style animation, Bollywood musical & a streak of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Set in a world in which penguins sing to connect with their soul-mates, the film focused on the unfortunate young Mumble, unable to carry a tune but endowed with a natural talent for tap-dancing.

It starts off, in short, as a fable about nonconformity & finding your own individual path—a good joke right off the bat, in the black-&-white uniformity of the penguin rookery (in The Far Side, Gary Larson once depicted a single penguin amongst the multitudes belting out “I’ve Gotta Be Me”). But by the end, director George Miller had spun the film from a sweet, if deeply eccentric, underdog tale into a grandiose environmentalist vision for which the word epic is hardly sufficient—“cosmic” would be more like it.

I’d be tempted to say it’s a one-of-a-kind movie, but as of this weekend, it’s not. A major box-office hit & an Oscar-winner besides, Happy Feet could hardly fail to spawn a sequel, & here it is, some five years later. In Happy Feet Two, Mumble (voiced by Elijah Wood) has the penguins mixing some fancy footwork in with their stirring oratorios—the tiny feet often splashing in ominous melt-water—but alas his own son Erik, ironically enough, isn’t much of a dancer. Poor Erik runs away from the shame of this, accompanied by two loyal pals, & Mumble heads off to find them.

While they’re gone, a huge chunk of Antarctic ice collides with the rookery, sealing thousands of penguins, including Erik’s Mom Gloria (voiced by Alecia Moore, aka Pink, replacing the late Brittany Murphy), off from the ocean. So it’s up to Mumble, Erik & his friends to try to find a way to save them—from hunger, from marauding skuas, & from general despair. Their allies this time include the Latin-accented Adelie penguin Ramon (Robin Williams) & his colony, elephant seals, electric-guitar-playing human researchers &, albeit unwittingly, two nearly-microscopic krill (Brad Pitt & Matt Damon) who have broken away from their enormous swarm to strike out on their own existential search for identity.

There’s also, of all birds, a puffin—named Sven, & voiced complete with Nordic accent by Hank Azaria—who has somehow found his way to the other end of the world. He’s been mistaken for a penguin who can fly, which gives him the status of a sort of self-improvement spiritual leader.

In other words, like the first film, Happy Feet Two is another big helping of off-the-wall weirdness. But also like the first film, it’s funny & good-hearted, & the musical numbers—which, a la Bollywood, freely mix snatches of the Rawhide theme, grand opera & Queen & Bowie’s “Under Pressure”—are thrilling, both in their relentless rhythms & in Miller’s dazzling, undulating visual perspectives.

Miller’s apparent purpose, this time, is to stave off the sense of despair that many of us feel over the seeming futility of individual action in the environmental struggle. The moral which the movie asserts—it’s also on the poster—is “Every Step Counts.” To this I can only say: I hope so.

OF GLEE THEY SING

All I know first-hand about Glee! the TV series, other than that it’s wildly popular, is what I’ve gleaned from the parts I’ve seen of two or three episodes. I liked what I saw, more or less—the eclecticism of the musical choices & the goofy overproduction of the numbers, the sweet exuberance of the young performers, the good values didactically delivered, and the even-toned comic villainy of Jane Lynch as a bracing counterbalance to the show’s self-conscious virtuousness.

But I’m sure that there’s plenty I didn’t “get” about Glee! The 3D Concert Movie, opening today. Directed by Kevin Tancharoen, this documentary chronicles a New Jersey stop on last summer’s concert tour by the show’s cast, remaining nominally in character while they perform dorky-but-rousing versions of pop favorites, scavenged from sources ranging from Britney Spears to the Beatles to Streisand, and performed in idiosyncratic arrangements.

Most of the performers seem like they’re trying a little too hard, in the Star Search/Up With People mode, but that has its own charm, within limits; it’s as if they’re auditioning for the right to go on living. One of them, Lea Michele, takes this to another level: She’s such a merciless crowd-pleaser that you may feel like somebody’s picked her up by the ankles and is swinging her at you like a club.

That said, I enjoyed a lot of these numbers. My favorite, I think, was Pink’s “Raise Your Glass,” bellowed by a group of young pretty-boys in traditional glee-club jackets. The incongruity between the costumes & the lyrics was strong showmanship.

Between songs, Tancharoen cuts to talking-head interviews with giddy Glee! fans outside the venue, naming their favorite character, or asserting what an unstoppable universal force for good the show is. There are also a few extended documentary sequences about fans struggling with “being different,” like a midget cheerleader in Yuba City, California, a girl with Asperger Syndrome, a gay teenage boy who was outed to the classmate on whom he had a crush. This stuff is interesting, at times harrowing—any of these strands could probably make a full-length documentary by itself.

Like most concert movies—Jonathan Demme’s great Stop Making Sense is one of the very few exceptions—Glee! The 3D Concert Movie seemed a little too long to me, & it’s a bit self-congratulatory, too. But I can’t deny that a good chunk of it made me smile & tap my foot. The 3D, by the way, is a gratuitous drag as usual—the only really amusing effects are some computer-animated fruit smoothies spilling at us during the closing credits, to the tune of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”