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PLOT: Thanks to various calamities, including a nefarious plot unleashed by rapscallion penguins, four animal friends from the Central Park Zoo in Manhattan find themselves washed ashore on the beaches of Madagascar. Chaos ensues.
Madagascar is not just a technological breakthrough, but also a fun and funny movie for all ages.
Count this digitally animated wonder as one of the guaranteed summer hits -- and deservedly so.
The hi-tech advance is the development of a new software program that allowed the DreamWorks animators to employ a technique called "squash & stretch." This technique creates exaggerated cartoon characters that can move at lightning speed, if necessary, and allows the computer animators more flexibility than available before.
In Madagascar, the technique works to perfection to create a breathlessly fast-moved, cleverly hip style. It is just what was needed in the service of a wacko fun story written by Mark Burton and Billy Frolick, along with co-directors and co-writers Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath.
The story is built around four unlikely animal friends who live at the Central Park Zoo in Manhattan. They are: the showoff Alex the Lion (the excellent voice work of Ben Stiller); the funky Marty the Zebra (Chris Rock riffing like comedy was jazz); the brassy Gloria the Hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith outdoing Will Smith, whose Shark Tale disappointed); and fussy Melman the Giraffe (David Schwimmer).
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Rock's Marty character has wanderlust. He longs to taste the wild. Thanks to a zoo breakout he engineers, as well as the subsequent activities of a gloriously insane flock of psychotic penguins, Marty does get to the wild. All the way to the African island nation of Madagascar.
And Marty is not alone. His three buddies are with him as they wash ashore in Madagascar and then engage the local fauna, including hundreds of party-passionate lemurs.
The movie is actually a tale of friendship -- tested and eventually found secure, even when all heck breaks loose in the jungle. Reality and fantasy do an artistic dance together on screen but the movie's emotional base is real.
As art, it is lush, lavish and colourful. As comedy, it is often hilarious. And, as family fare, it is mostly innocent and child-friendly, although there is some food-chain business that provides some momentary shocks, especially the demise of a little duckie. It is a wild world out there, after all.
Squashin' & stretchin'
Call it a retro-future innovation. The squash & stretch animation technique used in Madagascar dates back to the 1930s when it was first used by the famous Warner Bros. animators at Termite Terrace. This is where creative geniuses such as Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Friz Freleng and others worked on what became a unique and wild animation style for cartoons starring Bugs Bunny & friends.
In digital animation before Madagascar the technique was not compatible with computer programs. So past digital cartoons were more stilted, slower moving and just different. Now there is more flexibility -- assuming you want to use the Warner Bros. cartoonie effect. It is not appropriate for every animated film -- the Shrek series, for example.
(This film is rated G)