![]() ![]() Malkovich is a great choice for Dave not because he's famous, but because he is from another planet, which makes him seem like an ideal choice to play a hyper-intelligent octopus with plans for world domination. That's so uncommon in Hollywood because they cling to the notion of movie stars even in animation, where it seems pointless. They've got their own weird chemistry, and because they aren't recognizable voices, they exist just as these characters. I like that they didn't go out of their way t hire celebrities for the voices of the penguins. ![]() It really doesn't matter, because story isn't what matters in this film. There is a top secret team of animals who are already working to stop Dave and his organization, and the penguins are recruited by Classified (Benedict Cumberbatch) to help them bring Dave down before he can use a top-secret serum to do something dastardly to all of the penguins in the world. Somehow, this spirals into them being kidnapped by a bizarrely-disguised evil Octopus named Dave, voiced by John Malkovich, and if you think that sentence is enormously strange, join the club. One involves breaking into Fort Knox so they can hit a vending machine that sells a kind of cheesy puff that has been discontinued. Skipper is just a little penguin at this point, already permanently affixed to his best friends, Kowalski (Chris Miller) and Rico (Conrad Vernon), and when the three of them get separated from the rest of their kind while chasing a runaway egg, they find themselves adrift on an ice floe and in charge of a newborn penguin chick, who grows into Private by the time we catch up with the Penguins on the run.īasically, they are adorably feathered anarchy, and the big comic set pieces are just weird. The film starts with the penguins in their natural habitat, being filmed by a documentary film crew complete with the actual Werner Herzog narrating. The main goal of the movie is just to be ridiculous, and it does that in spades. They nod to creating a sentimental arc between Private (Christopher Knights) and Skipper (Tom McGrath), but they don't dwell on it, and they handle it with a fairly deft touch. It's also a profoundly silly movie that really isn't even trying to play by the conventional rules of family animation. It is a perfect example of marketing driving the machine. This is a crass piece of corporate product, an animation studio working more as an IP farm than as a storytelling unit, and it exists so that Dreamworks Animation can continue to wring money out of the “Madagascar” franchise. First, let's state the obvious and get it out of the way. ![]()
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