Monday, December 11, 2006

Penguin film cops a blast

The Independent's Jonathan Romney really, really, took a dislike to Happy Feet (which has generally received good press). The highlights of his review:

But the nadir of digital animation - absolutely the most joyless, imaginatively bankrupt spectacle it has produced - is the penguin extravaganza Happy Feet. I'd rather have spent seven days and nights on an ice floe than have watched this. This tender-hearted eco-minded musical by George Miller (yes, Mad Max George Miller) scores an own goal: you go in favourably disposed to penguins, and you come out wishing you could personally nuke every last one of the wretched creatures out of the Antarctic. Happy Feet is as hideous as its title suggests.....

Happy Feet is so mendaciously dewy-eyed about the wildlife it feigns to respect that it makes Bambi look like a Werner Herzog documentary....

But in terms of humour, or humanity, or real imagination, the film is crass, ugly, wasteful and an impasse for an art form that has, in a mere decade, transformed the way we see screen images. Is this what digital animation has come to - a multi-million-dollar screensaver?

For those who share my love of the art of aggressively negative movie reviews, this one is pretty damn good.

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