flightless birds and missed kairos

I really had no idea what I was getting into when I went to see Happy Feet yesterday. I've seen the previews, I thought it'd be a cute kids' movie about an outcast who tap dances instead of sings, and I both sing AND tap dance, so how could it miss?

Well, the movie wasn't about that, it was a 2 hour rhetorical strike against the fishing industry, which doesn't count as a "miss" automatically in my book. But it DID miss, no matter what the critics tell you, and I'm pretty sure that if I had taken a kid to this movie that I'd be downright angry at the heavy handed rhetoric being forced onto my kid that I had NO idea about based upon the previews and all the toys.

So first, I'll warn that there are spoilers here. But if you have kids, some of these spoilers might be useful to you--I dunno. But if you wanna be surprised, stop here.

Still with me? Good. So here's where the movie's rhetoric shined, and shined so much I actually thought they were going to pull it off:

1. Near the end of the movie, Mumble uses his dance moves to communicate with man, bring man to his fellow penguins, and get man to help them out. The previews certainly did the same trick to me--the dancing penguins in the previews WORKED to get my ass into the movie theater.

2. Somewhere in the middle Mumble is playing with some new friends and they start an avalanche of sorts. You see this big piece of construction equipment fall off the cliff with them, seemingly randomly. In any order animated film this would be something to laugh at, some random visual element thrown in for laughs. But it wasn't, they used it, and did so well.

3. The movie adequately calls upon both the concept of the "Other" in Mumble and also sets him up to be the one true savior of penguin society--and if they'd left it there, it might have worked. The movie is obviously SET UP to be a myth, with a narrator and all, so using the same sort of character as The Matrix and Star Wars and other similar hero-quest myth stories makes absolute sense.

4. All the people in the movie are REAL people, not computer animated. That's when the movie stops being a myth abruptly, and it works. It's cool.

So what's not to like?

Well, after all that, the movie jumps the shark spectacularly. My ticket was ALMOST worth it just to discover that I could, indeed, call a missed kairotic moment "jumping the shark" and that it may very well be useful to do so to students "Well, your paper jumps the shark here..." because that terminology describes what's wrong with a lot of arguments so much better than other language (you know, once I explain what that means).

I had a lot of hopes halfway through the movie. They were obviously on an ecological bent--save the fish. Hrm okay. I'd recently read an article that says all the fish supplies will be gone by the year 2048 or something like that, so the timing on the article + movie was right.

Mumble ends up in a zoo, and goes kinda crazy and starts seeing things. I've not been a fan of zoos since I was at the Toledo one and this poor high school girl was stuck standing in front of the tiger exhibit, with the skin of their star tiger's HEAD, letting people pet it. Ew. That's cruel and gross, so I don't do zoos very well (though I still wanted the detroit one to stay open last year, go figure, if only to compete against the nasty tiger head down in Toledo).

Uh anyway, I can buy that. But then, it's like the studio execs said "we're running out of time! hurry up and shove it down their throats!" and they started dying on every single last move in the film. It's freaking PAINFUL.

First, a little girl taps on the glass at Mumble, and he remembers how to dance. The very next scene he's back on the ice at home and he's got a radio transmitter BUILT INTO HIS BACK. I mean, ow. It's clear people were excited about him and his dancing, but I figured he was just hallucinating again. You could see everyone in the entire audience (and it was packed with families because we're cheap and do matinees) looking around going "wtf?" to each other.

Because at least the grown ups know that no zoo would let a tap dancing bird into the wild again, even with a transmitter. Duh. And how'd he let them know he wanted to come back? How'd ANY of this happen? If you're going to have REAL humans in a computer animated flick, then they need to act like real humans, or else the fact you used REAL humans is utterly meaningless.

So he's back home, and the humans are coming, and he convinces everybody to dance for them, overthrowing the crazy christian like cult that this group of penguins lives in. And they dance, and it changes the world.

No really. The next few minutes is a series of shots of how people saw the penguins dance and immediately changed the world. There's this super fast animation of them pulling fishing boats away from the penguins' habitat and getting rid of them all, of people stopping eating fish COMPLETELY, and being moved by the dancing penguins. Oh, and the penguins don't become a vacation destination, like they undoubtedly would in real life.

This is all over in a matter of minutes, then we see that the fish are back, Mumble has a kid with his long time girlfriend, and pow, the movie is over.

And people applauded, but kids were looking around going "what the heck?" I was right with them.

The movie jumped it by first of all not spending enough time on the transformation. It was the most heavy handed move I've ever seen in any movie EVER: people did this and all the penguins were happy! YOU HAVE TO DO IT TOO!

Will this work on kids? I dunno. By that point, the movie is so damn slow they were probably bored out of their minds. The first half was fun, the second, more important, half was boring as all hell. So my guess would have to be no.

The sequence is so damn painful that I can't even begin to describe why. It wasn't painful in a "make you uncomfortable" sort of way either, it was just out of step with the rest of the movie. They seemed to be building up to something big and good, and I thought that maybe there would be a true moment of kairos here, but no--it just doesn't work. The penguins are flightless, so's the rhetoric.

But it did get us talking. The boy was talking about how there's just too many people in the world. I was puzzling over why they made that last really shitty rhetorical move. It could have been brilliant.

Except I can't think of a single OTHER thing they could have done. Had the people cut back fishing a little? Had the people start feeding the penguins? Have a fund set up that movie goers could donate to to help the birds? (actually, that last one is a little closer to what they might have done with a scaled back ending.)

You can't talk about overpopulation in this movie, though that might have been done in a different sort of one. You can't tell people that if EVERYONE in the entire world stopped eating fish that then they'd be eating something else, encroaching on some other poor animal's habitat (but that other poor animal isn't a cute and smart little penguin, so clearly that's okay). You can't do that, so at best, this movie might have made people THINK.

And that's what it fails to do, it spoon feeds a solution instead of making people think of a solution (or at least a bigger one, had they not gone for the rock 'em sock 'em ending that they did). Kids might never eat fish again, but they're parents are likely to tell them it's just a movie and to eat the damn fish sticks anyway.

Maybe somebody will be inspired by this movie to become an activist and someday take those fishing companies on. Maybe that was the point. Maybe they just wanted to create that one person that will change the world. But where does that leave the rest of us? If we wanted to help, we were given no way to do so. And even if we do care, that ending was so gosh darned wince inducing that I practically ran from the theater, embarassed that I had EVER wanted to see it.

Because it misses, that much, in those last few minutes. The critics are cheering that a kids movie took on a big issue--great. But if the big issues are taken on and the movie fails at it--what's to crow about?

x-posted over at my other journal.