I Got Happy Feet

This is the thing. I am not the most insightful guy in the world. In fact, I'm like a guy with a twenty-five foot fishing line, fishing in a hundred feet of water, most of the good stuff goes right by me. I'm like a child who can't swim, I stay out of the deep water. Okay, I've reached the two metaphor limit so I'll stop there. The reason that I bring this up is that I took Sneedlet 1 to see the movie, Happy Feet this afternoon. I invited Sneedlet 2 but his mom said he needed a nap, so he went home. This isn't really a movie review, so relax. I expect that most people went to the show thinking it was another animated kid's movie, full of lovable anthropomorphic characters, in this case penguins, trying to overcome some big problem. For the three to eight crowd, it was exactly that. All of these animated kid's movies, like most movies these days, have an underlying message or ten. The lovely Mrs. Sneed and I have given up on the movies because we don't think movie-makers have that much to teach us, but they persist in trying. That may be narrow, but if it is, too bad. Happy Feet had several messages for the viewer. The first was the idea that non-conformists have a harder time in life than conformists. If that is news to you, I wonder where you have been, but I digress. In this movie, our hero penguin, Mumbles, was a terrific dancer in a world full of singers. The basic message to Mumbles from his community was, "shape up or ship out, different is dangerous." At this point the makers of the movie took the time to take a swipe at some vague relious reference about offending a higher power or something by dancing rather than singing. It was really confusing. Interestingly, the penguin world that Mumbles lives in seemed to be black, based on the music and the penguin's abundance of soul. Plus Mumbles, while not being able to sing a lick, was a hell of a tap-dancer. I'm not making this up. The leader of the penguins inexplicably spoke with a Scottish accent, so maybe the message was that whitey is keeping the black man down, even when they are a bunch of penguins. I don't know. Poor Mumbles was banished but found friends among a community of smaller penguins, who were decidedly Hispanic and valued dancing over singing. Not just any group of Hispanic penguins mind you, but Penguins from the 'hood, Vatos, complete with visual and linguistic parodies. Stereotypes definitely didn't concern the writers of this movie, or maybe they were making fun of stereotypes, and I missed the point (See the first paragraph). We learned that a lot of people, or penguins in this case, believe that safety comes from not changing too much, by doing what you know. The status quo was valued in the penguin world. We also learned that that old answers don't solve new problems, that one brave individual can prevail against overwhelming forces and that greedy and uncaring humans cause most of the penguin problems in life. Whew! In the dramatic conclusion, we discovered that the way to solve the environmental problems that plague Antartica in general and Emperor penguins in particular, is for one lone and heroic penguin to get locked in a public aquarium, where he can wow the viewing public with his tap-dancing prowess, which will naturally cause biologists to release the penguin from captivity with a tracking device attached to his back, so that it will lead them to a previously unknown variety of singing and dancing penguin. This will raise the awareness of selfish humans everywhere, who will in turn, give up exploiting the environment and save the dancing and singing birds and their environment,and save the humans at the same time. Simple, yet effective. Important and worthwhile goals all. As a kid movie it was pretty entertaining and full of amazing animation. Unfortunately, it was also a jumble of messages aimed and moms and dads and real preachy. So there, the end of my non-review, review. Okay, it was a review, but it didn't start out to be, so I'm excused. Merle. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgemental and cranky Tag: Daily Life Personal Finance Humor