Choking penguins

Chel and I went to see Happy Feet last night, and it was all good until we met the penguin with the soda six-pack plastic thingy caught around his neck. The first part of the movie was a tap-dancing, musical lesson in being proud of your individual talents and differences — you know, the same moral that all those other movies like Cars and Monsters Inc. show so well.

Then we got caught (like Lovelace the penguin getting caught in a soda six-pack plastic thingy, if you will) in an environmentalist tirade. The voice of Lovelace was played by Robin Williams, but you wouldn’t know that in the second half of the movie, since all you could hear was the sound of him choking.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about the environment, but the message they tried to send in Happy Feet could have been done much more effectively without being so overdramatically sad. By the time they tried to end the movie on another tap-dancing high note, it ended up sounding just stupid and overly preachy. We left the movie feeling, well, not happy…and feeling no more empowered than we felt before to do anything to help the poor penguins.