Animated News’ Christian Ziebarth recently attended a screening and press junket for PDI/DreamWorks Animation’s Madagascar, which is due in theaters this Friday, May 27. Following is his report (minor spoilers involved):
Now that the Star Wars hype has died down and everyone on the planet has seen Episode III we can focus on the next big animated movie coming out. I saw this as part of a press junket a couple weeks ago and have been struggling with what to say about it. And now, after much deliberation, I’m going to start off my review with my initial impression of the movie (drum roll please): I liked it. It wasn’t spectacular, stupendous, or outstanding but somehow it held my attention with a brisk pace, sumptuous visuals, and a healthy dose of comedy (don’t tell anyone, but there’s one line that still makes me laugh every time I think about it). Marty the zebra, like Luke Skywalker yearning to get off of Tatooine, yearns to get out of New York’s Central Park Zoo. He doesn’t dislike the zoo, he’s just getting tired of the routine. Something tells him that there’s gotta be more to life than preening for admiring crowds and ending the day with a catered dinner of fresh wheat grass that looks like it escaped from Jamba Juice or some other health food/smoothie bar. After failing to convince his lion (Alex, voiced by Ben Stiller), giraffe (Melman, voiced by David Schwimmer), and hippopotamus (Gloria, voiced by Jada Pinkett Smith) friends to escape with him, Marty decides to escape on his own. Of course things get out of hand and when Alex, Gloria, and Melman go looking for him and four penguins with escape plans of their own get thrown into the mix everyone ends up on the other side of the globe, on an island known as Madagascar off the east coast of the African continent.
While stranded on the island nature puts a strain on the friendship between Alex and Marty, the gang of four meets up with a tribe of lemurs who live to party, and the menacing foosas (reminiscent of the hyenas in The Lion King) test the survival instinct in the lemurs and the castaways. As the refrain of the Born Free theme played in a dream sequence at the beginning of the film would suggest, Alex succumbs most to the call of the wild and realizing the potential of his destructive power he banishes himself to another part of the island (no, he doesn’t find Gilligan and crew). But the self-imposed exile ends when Alex realizes he must save his friends from a threat much less scrupulous than himself. The threat is conquered and Alex realizes friends don’t bite friends and they all prepare to head back to the safety of the zoo.
Madagascar employs more of the classic “squash and stretch” technique than ever seen before in a computer generated film (albeit none of the characters stretch as much as The Incredibles’ Elastigirl) and just a higher level of overall cartooniness that I found refreshing (look for the two kaleidoscopic moments). It is easy to see that such cartooniness will be found even more in subsequent CGI features, thus blurring the boundaries between 2D and 3D animation. Some of the animators said that they didn’t try to work the likenesses of the big name stars into the characters but I couldn’t help but think that Chris Rock’s toothy grin still found its way on to Marty’s smile a couple times.
The film did have moments of adult humor but not as much as I was expecting after having seen previous DreamWorks animated movies, so it’s likely to be perceived as a very family-friendly flick. Adroit pop culture junkies will catch references to American Beauty, Planet of the Apes, The Lost World, Jurassic Park III, Cast Away, Silence of the Lambs, The Twilight Zone, and more. It was learned in a roundtable interview with the producers, Mireille Soria and Teresa Cheng, that they had also planned on working in a Lion King reference with a joke about “the ‘oval’ of life.”
The voice work in Madagascar is at least servicable. During the first few minutes I kept thinking the actors were merely reading their lines but that impression disspelled as the film progressed and the voice actors loosened up (I realize the lines are not recorded in the order they appear in the movie but the stiffness only seemed present at the beginning of the film). The standout voice performance would easily be Sacha Baron Cohen’s role as the lemur king. You can just tell he had a blast performing it. Ben Stiller came right out and admitted at the press conference that if he had auditioned for the part he wouldn’t have got it yet Stiller still instills his leonine character with an infectious zest and innocent charm. Jada Pinkett Smith (Gloria the hippo) gives her character the right combination of sweetness and strength. And David Schwimmer effectively voices his stressed-out, doped-up giraffe.
This movie never has a dull moment. The characters are likable and well-rounded and there is always something interesting to look at (notice how lush and colorful the jungle is). It may not be firing on all cylinders or spend too much time brooding about deep and heavy issues, but it does succeed as a fun-filled cartoon that most people should find enjoyable.
Some of the concept art on display at the press junket
Oh, by the way, while up there in San Francisco I bumped into Olivier, the guy who ran the old Animated Movies website:
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L, Olivier; R, Christian
