12-05-06, 10:00 am

Happy Feet Director, George Miller Rated PG

Not only does it appear that right-wing movie critic Michael Medved lacks imagination, but one also wonders if he even watches the movies he reviews. This is my impression after reading his negative review of one of the funniest, most charming family films of 2006, Happy Feet.

Medved called the film 'painfully unpleasant' and 'a decidedly downbeat experience.' He also described it as 'politically correct' and as portraying humans as evil. Medved even claimed that the movie would 'terrify young viewers.'

But that wasn’t my experience – nor that of the millions of children and adults who have already seen the movie.

With 'Oscar buzz' and earnings at more than $120 million in just three weeks – with two of those weeks as the number 1 movie in the country – one has to wonder if Medved bothered to see it. What kind of young moviegoers does Medved know?

Notoriously slanted to the right politically, Medved apparently disapproved of what he believed to be some of the content and decided to pan the movie.

Happy Feet is the tale of a colony of Emperor penguins living on an Antarctic ice shelf. While ordinary penguins learn to find their soul mates through song, a quality that makes them truly penguins, according to their received wisdom, one late arrival is unique. Mumble (Elijah Wood) can't sing and loves to tap dance. This oddity causes many penguins to ostracize him. Though Mumble falls in love with Gloria (Brittany Murphy), his inability to sing and his misunderstood outsider status prevents a serious mating ritual. Soon, in semi-exile, he meets a fun-loving group of smaller penguins who teach him to accept and love his differences.

But all is not happy in penguin land. The food supply is running low and starvation looms. While the leaders of the Emperor colony chalk up their difficulties to the whims of the 'Great Wind' and to his disappointment with them for harboring a dangerous pariah like Mumble, Mumble realizes that the fish supply is being over-harvested by mysterious aliens (humans). He concludes that he must reach out to them somehow to convince them to stop.

Mumble travels north to where the humans live in order to find a way to appeal to their 'better nature' and gete them to help the starving penguins.

The film is a visual masterpiece with startingly realistic landscapes. The songs are fun, and the story is both heart-warming and unique.

So what movie was Medved watching? I took my kids (seven and three) to see the movie, and they applauded at the end along with dozens of other children in the audience (and many adults as well) and tap danced all the way out to the car. They were hardly terrified.

Medved's charge that the film portrays humans as evil is nonsense. The plain truth is that the movie did the opposite. Certainly excessive abuse of natural resources was depicted as dangerous to the other creatures that populate the planet. But in the end, it is the humans that find a way to help the penguins survive. Their 'better nature' ultimately wins out.

If Medved isn't going to do his job as a film critic right, why does he get paid the big bucks?

Medved's accusation that the film is 'politically correct' is a right-wing code phrase designed not to help his readers understand the story but to dismiss it simplistically because he disagrees with what he believes to be its political message.

So which part of its message does he dislike? Is it the story line that stresses that we should accept and appreciate as equal those penguins who are different then the norm? Maybe Medved disapproves of the film's depiction of pollution as harmful. Perhaps Medved doesn't want his kids seeing a movie that positively portrays cross-species interaction. Or could it be that Medved doesn't want the general public to be influenced by a story that hints that penguin survival depends on the policies and practices of human beings?

What got into Medved's britches? Was it the story's suggestion that reality-based explanations for social ills can help us better solve them rather than relying on 'God-is-angry-with-us' claims lobbed about by religious fundamentalists?

Whatever Medved's message, it is clear that we didn't see the same movie. But millions of people who are smarter and more open-minded than he have made the movie a big hit. See it for yourself.



--Joel Wendland is managing editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at