44. Penguins of Madagascar
There’s a lot to be said about films that exist just to be dumb fun and I go up to bat for them a lot. However, the difference between something like this and the other Madagascar films is that there is a lot about them that feels genuine in terms of character writing and heart that a lot of people just did not appreciate at the time of their initial release. They were popular with kids but film reviewers tended to stick their noses up at movies like them for indulging in slapstick comedy rather than being another heart shattering exploration of the human psyche like most Pixar films were at the time.
As great as those can be, never let it be said that comedy in cartoons isn’t something to be celebrated. The jokes were really well thought out and the problems that the characters had, ranging from the fear of going feral when being returned to the wild or being scared of doing an incredibly strange circus act, were all very interesting and hard not to be enamored by.
They were films that, over time, embraced how goofy and weird they were without withdrawing from character development based on true flights of extremely odd fancy.
This movie is not like those movies. This was a film that was made to capitalize on the popularity of the Penguins from Madagascar and that is it.
The Penguins in Madagascar were a fun group of side-characters from the first Madagascar film that acted as special agent... penguins. They had no real affiliation with any spy organization. They just acted like secret agents because it was funny. The joke landed because it was novel and unexpected. The writing and acting helped sell it to the audience too. They were a hit and became popular enough that they got their own film and later their own television show.
This sort of thing tends to happen often. Usually, it would be a disastrous thing to do because the point of comedic relief is to provide relief from the serious nature of the story being told. As a result, most of the more popular characters were the comedic relief. Sometimes it managed to work when you had a solid enough duo that could sell the comedy of a situation without being overbearing and annoying. The dynamic Timon and Pumbaa from the Lion King had was a great example of that. Their comedy didn’t come from acting crazy and off the wall all the time. One was a schemer and the other was slightly dull headed but charming in his own way. They worked well together.
The penguins are in a similar boat. Their gimmick was funny in a way that didn’t require them to be bouncing off the walls or screeching at the poor adults who came to the theaters to give their children a good time. The suave demeanor of their leader, Skipper (Tom McGrath), and the varied personalities of the others ranging from the straight faced Kowalski (Chris Miller), the silent but unhinged Rico (Conrad Vernon), and the adorable and well meaning Private (Christopher Knights) gave the four of them a group dynamic that could have made for a very interesting film.
I hear the show managed to capitalize on that very well but this film did not.
I got nothing out of watching this film. It’s not funny. It’s not painfully unfunny but its jokes just aren’t very catchy. There’s maybe one or two jokes I laughed at and the rest I just thought were cute. There’s a running joke where the main villain of this film, Dave the Octopus (John Malkovich), keeps calling the names of his henchmen in differently structured sentences that when put together make the name of a celebrity. He’ll say things like “Nicolas, Cage them!” and “Kevin! Bake on. We’re still gonna need that victory cake!” and I found that cute.
It’s never funny. It was just cute.
However, I do feel like the villain, Dave, and the humor surrounding him, is indicative of the kind of film this is. Everything about him right down to his name is soaked in tired old jokes you’ve heard before. He shows up dressed as a human doctor before the Penguins he’s kidnapped and then dramatic music plays as he reveals his name is Dave.
It’s that joke you’ve heard a million times before where the threatening bad guy has the least threatening name you can think of. They then immediately follow that up with a joke about the Penguins not remembering who he is because, while he knows them, they don’t know him. His backstory makes that clear because they’ve never met but he has a grudge against them because he was an attraction at the Zoo that kids loved… and then the Penguins showed up and stole his thunder. Apparently, the fact that the penguins were cute was considered Dave’s fault and the Zoo shipped him away because he was no longer being looked at. We’re told this happened at every single zoo he was transferred to.
He’s sad, alone, and full of rage because he’s been treated like an unloved loser all his life for literally no reason. Still, despite this, he’s managed to find a seemingly endless cavalcade of other octopi whom he remembers all the names of. Looking at the army he’s amassed it seems like he’s found the love and respect he’s been looking for finally but the movie never acknowledges this. I guess those earlier years of being neglected warped his mind into not being able to recognize what companionship is. I can only guess because it’s never stated.
He tries to get revenge on all the penguins of the world by turning them into monsters and sicking them on the humans to make them hate all penguins.
You can’t really feel sorry for him unfortunately. Not because his backstory is cliche (it is) but also because he found something that should make him happy now and he’s just vindictive despite that. The film sometimes seems like it wants you to feel for him but not really? It’s a bit too back and forth for me to be completely sure what they’re going for. He’s animated really well at least.
They also do the other joke you’ve heard of before where Skipper can’t remember Dave’s name even though it’s not a hard name to remember at all. It’s not like they have Skipper learn much here anyway. The lesson he has to learn is to just respect the Private a little more than he has and that’s it.
The movie’s primary focus is the Private as it begins with them all saving him and watching him hatch as children during a segment where the filming of a nature documentary is taking place. It’s the one inspired joke in the film and it was also something I thought of right before it happened. You see Penguins waddling in a line in Antarctica, you think of nature documentaries.
Side note, they were born in Antarctica and thought it was boring and left. In the first Madagascar movie they were trying to escape the zoo because being there wasn’t natural and they wanted to go to “the wild” and headed to Antarctica but also thought it was boring and went to Madagascar instead. They were young so maybe they forgot but the movie makes it seem like they didn’t. They flash back to their humble beginnings when Skipper is mulling over how he’s failed the private by allowing him to get captured. It’s just an example of how expanding the lore of these characters sometimes leads to inconsistencies with what’s already been established, especially if you’re only making this film because the penguins are popular.
The underdog story of the Private proving to Skipper and the others that he should be respected leads to him saving them all and showing them that he can do it too, whatever “it” is. It shares the screen with a side-plot about the Penguins being helped by a group of animals that run an elite intelligence agency known as the North Wind. It’s led by Classified the Wolf (Benedict Cumberbatch), Corporal the Polar Bear (Peter Stormare), Short Fuse the Seal (Ken Jeong), and Eva the Snowy Owl (Annet Mahendru).
These characters exist to have a dick measuring contest with the Penguins and soften Skipper’s self-important nature a bit. Granted, Classified has a much bigger ego than Skipper’s due to being surrounded by much more grandiose and hi-tech stuff. They put themselves forth as the professionals in this situation but come off as a little incompetent due to being constantly thwarted by the Penguins’ attempts to disrupt them. There certainly are times where they prove themselves superior to them but not really enough to make them feel super relevant to what’s going on. They barely have a part to play in the climax as a result.
Their existence also just kind of rings a little too hollow and far-fetched. Considering what happens in the Madagascar series that sounds like I’m saying a lot but the absurdity of the series always felt like it was rooted in the wackiness of these animals bleeding into a world that was trying to be normal but failing. That was always part of the fun for me.
For example, Shantel Dubois, the main villain in the third film, was acting like a terminator but the joke was that she was doing all these action hero stunts with the simple goal of catching and killing a lion by utilizing her skills as a member of animal control.
It was an animal control agent that was doing all that nonsensical stuff and it was hilarious and crazy in a good way. When you wipe away the barrier between real life and cartoons and just say that animals can run a secret intelligence agency with hi-tech gadgets and don’t offer an explanation or reason to sell the joke (if it’s supposed to even be a joke) then it doesn’t work. It just feels as though they’re being lazy. There’s nothing inventive about it. It feels like something that would be better fit in a sequel to Zootopia. Sure, Madagascar takes place in a world where the animals are cartoonish, outlandish, and do impossible, weird things but they're supposed to still technically be regular zoo animals. It feels as though they forgot that.
The penguins breaking into Fort Knox just to steal Cheesy Dibbles from a vending machine is the kind of thing I came here to see. I still don’t entirely know or get how Dave was able to amass all the stuff he’s got and the movie was never interested in explaining that away with a joke because it would have probably required being too clever.
At the end of the day, this was a film I watched and it’s the first one of the Dreamworks films that felt like a stretched out pilot for a TV show. That said, people really like the TV show that was made for the Penguins after this so at least this led to some good for somebody down the line.
| Viewed: |
18 times |
| Added: |
1 month, 3 weeks ago
27 Mar 2025 22:17 CET
|
|
|
