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Friday, May 27, 2005
Reborn free: King of the asphalt jungle goes wild in 'Madagascar'
Eric Darnell ("Antz") and Tom McGrath plug old-fashioned Looney Tunes style into the computer-animated film and come up with the zippiest CGI comedy DreamWorks has produced to date.
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View all photosShowbiz lion Alex (voice of Ben Stiller), the merchandised-to-the-mane king of the Central Park Zoo, loves living in the Big Apple: the feel of cement, the sounds of cars and sirens, the black night sky where helicopter spotlights are the closest you get to starlight. His best friend, Marty the zebra (Chris Rock), longs for the legendary open plains.
When Marty escapes to sample the wild (of Connecticut, via Grand Central Station, of course), the ensuing city adventure of Alex and his buddies, Melman the hypochondriac giraffe (David Schwimmer) and Gloria the hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith), is misinterpreted as a cry for escape, the furthest thing from their minds. Shipped off to an animal preserve in Kenya, they wind up (due to the "Great Escape" shenanigans of a hilarious platoon of penguins) washing ashore in Madagascar.
Alex is no predator, he's a ham who lives for the spotlight, but he succumbs to his primal instincts in the wild (the marvelously animated sequences suggest a giant housecat in the feral fever of play) and his best friends start to look an awful lot like dinner on the hoof. It's the film's basic conflict -- instinct versus individual choice -- and it comes through with what I like to call the "Iron Giant" moral: "You are who you choose to be."
Slim on plot but fat with furiously paced gags, "Madagascar" is a routine story enlivened by location, color, exotic landscapes and a cascade of comic flourishes. The directors give a modern twist on the Bugs and Daffy cartoons of Tex Avery and Chuck Jones, from the sleekly stylized faces and extreme caricatured bodies to the whiplash movements and zippy comic pacing.
For the adults, there is a non-stop bar rage of cultural references, from "American Beauty" and "Silence of the Lambs" to "The Twilight Zone" and "National Geographic" TV specials.
For the kids, there are a smattering of poo jokes (some inspired -- it's the lingua franca of the monkey kingdom, after all) and slapstick gags, all directed with zany energy. It could be more involving, but it's funny enough that you won't care.
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