HAPPY FEET is an animated movie about a tap-dancing penguin who teaches the other penguins in his flock how to dance along with their already excellent, if derivative, singing.
Compare this to SURF'S UP, an animated movie about a surfing penguin who travels to a tropical island to compete in a surfing competition.
Why compare the two? Because for some reason, animated surfing penguins are more interesting and exciting than animated dancing penguins. I don't know why. I find live-action surfing movies to be remarkably dull (and I surf), but I can watch Astair and Kelly movies all day long. All the excitement of dance vanishes when it's animated, however, even if I know that someone, somewhere, actually did those tap routines so they could get recorded and animated.
So if HAPPY FEET's big draw is the dance numbers, and the dance numbers are flat, what else has it got? Well it has excellent singing (Brittany Murphy, Hugh Jackman, and Nicole Kidman all lend their voices), and yet another tiresome performance from Robin Williams, who is at a point in his career in which he just has to scale things back a little. But those singing performances are hampered by the fact that they're all covers of popular songs, which subtracts from the spell the movie is ostensibly trying to cast.
My 7-yr-old liked HAPPY FEET, but I think it's no SURF'S UP. Give me surfing penguins over dancing penguins any day of the week.
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