Penguins Of Madagascar

What To Expect:

There is something inherently pleasing about Penguins. Our tuxedo clad flappers of the animal kingdom. Yet I can’t seem to put my hand on it. They have the ability to turn adult and child alike into helpless bundles of joy admiring their ‘cuteness’. They also have the ability to make a 28 year old endure 90 minutes in a theatre crammed with 150 screaming children without suffering a nervous breakdown, in 3D.

The Penguins stole the first two entries into the Madagascar series. It’s that simple, and it was no easy task especially when you are surrounded with voice talent that included Ben Stiller [Meet The Parents] and Sacha Baron Cohen [Borat]. So viewers will undoubtedly be charmed and entertained by our flipper clad friends

Films that are often cast into the cinematic hell known as straight to DVD [Disney’s Return Of Jaffar is an example] but instead get upgraded into cinematic releases, and in this instance, thank god for that.

What’s It About?

Penguins of Madagascar finds our flightless protagonists Skipper [Tom McGrath, co-creator of the Madagascar characters], Kowalski [Chris Miller], Rico [Conrad Vernon] and the cutest of the bunch Private [Christopher Knights] caught up in an international plot to mutate penguins from all over the world so they become hideously disfigured and unloved by humans. The plot is hatched by Dr. Octavius Brine [Brilliantly voiced by John Malkovich], a once-famous octopus named Dave, extremely upset for being sidelined by the penguins in zoo-goers’ hearts.

A covert group known as The North Wind aids the penguins on their journey. Led by Agent Classified (Benedict Cumberbatch), an egotistical power loving wolf, Short Fuse (Ken Jeong), a small seal whose specialty is explosives; Eva (Annet Mahendru), an intelligence analyst owl; and Corporal (Peter Stomare), a polar bear with a huge heart.

Their motto “Nobody breaks the

The movie even pays tongue-in-cheek homage to the tons of documentary films that chronicle the lives of the cuddly penguins [March of the Penguins] with a documentary sequence voiced over by visionary director Werner Herzog.

At points towards the film’s finale it begins to feel robotic and repetitive, but that does not discount the significant work made in the animation department. This is a stunningly beautiful film with little touches that really encourage you to tip your hat at everyone involved. I’m not an advocate of the 3D revolution but I was so taken in by the details of the film’s habitat that after a while it didn’t bother me profusely.

The main overpowering negative that I would assign to Penguins is that directors Eric Darnell and Simon J. Smith tried to do too much. It’s like landing on a great thing and overusing it until it becomes unbearable. That doesn’t happen here but it gets mighty close. By the film’s epic finale, too much has been jam packed in, there is an excess of non-stop action sequences, little breathing room between jokes and what initially may have been an adorable running joke, gets older and older with every repetitive piece of