Dancing mumble penguin8/10/2023 To rely on a literal translation of an actual performance is to miss the potential for expressiveness beyond the capabilities of real dancer that is the particular potential of animation. But of course, this isn’t a live tap performance it’s an animated film, so surely Miller should have been talking to artists in the discipline in which he was working. Animation is all about expression through movement: animators can do so in their art-form with just as much facility as a dancer can in theirs. What this shows is a strange ignorance of – even contempt for – the form in which he’s working. He has assumed that the answer was to find a great tap-dancer, telling the Washington Post that he knew “even the greatest animators in the world would take a lifetime to pull off the nuances of dancing that a gifted dancer is able to pull off.” So Miller hired tap dancer Savion Glover and motion-captured his performance, transferring his movements straight into Mumble. Those that there are, however, reveal a deeper problem, which is that Miller hasn’t really worked out how to make these penguins dance. There are surprisingly few proper dance numbers: the penguins sing to each other a lot, but the really big, uplifting dance spectaculars are few and far between. Firstly, the music is dull: like Moulin Rouge, it presents a fairly middle-of-the-road selection of songs that would suit a “hits and memories” radio station, yet without the earlier film’s inventiveness and spirited arrangements. 1929: The Skeleton Dance 2006: Happy Feetīut it doesn’t work. Which is good: it’s recognising a basic property of animation – that it’s highly suited to musicals – and exploiting it. Disney’s famous short The Skeleton Dance did this in 1929, and the dance sequences in Happy Feet are ultra-sophisticated variations on the same basic effect. In effect, a quirk of the medium (that drawings can be precisely timed to music) and a labour-saving technique (reusing animation) are exploited for their aesthetic effect. In the earliest days of sound cartoons, it was quickly realised that if you timed animation to music, and then made multiple copies of the drawings, what you ended up with was the ultimate in perfectly in-step dance lines. When I reviewed Flushed Away, I noted that the frogs in that film played on a well established type of joke in animation: groups of characters working together in improbably coordinated harmony. The potential for really grand, spectacular musical numbers is obvious. Penguins are cute, they mass in large groups, and computer animation allows for really ambitious large-scale choreography. I had assumed it would be the basic appeal of the premise that would get Happy Feet across the line. And after all, how wrong could you go with dancing penguins? He showed with Mad Max and its sequels that he has an extraordinary feel the kinetics of cinema, and with the two Babe films * he showed he could produce a childlike whimsy in special-effects laden movies. It’s a major Australian animated feature, which is unusual and to be welcomed, and I have tremendous respect for George Miller, whom I have always considered to be one of Australia’s most talented filmmakers. I really wanted, even expected, to like it. One which, the ads insist, has “audiences floating out of the cinema on feel good clouds.” So what was the Happy Feet I saw? The film I saw was obviously well-intentioned, but it was poorly made, lamentably unmusical, and, well… depressing. This was a feel good dancing penguin movie, right? One which has been met by widespread audience and critical acclaim. Watching it, I felt a sense of disconnection from my fellow filmgoers that matched that of its protagonist. Happy Feet is a computer animated film about a free-spirited penguin, Mumble, who dances when all around him only sing.
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