Madagascar is the latest animated offering from Dreamworks and is aimed pretty squarely at children, though it’s got enough humour to be fun for adults too. (In fact, when I saw it there were no children present at the cinema!!)

Meet the Animals

A zebra named Marty is getting itchy feet… er, hooves… He’s ten years old, half his life gone, and all he’s got to look forward to is another half-life in the zoo, whereas in his dreams he’s roaming free in the wild…

Alex, the lion, is king of his domain… or at least, he’s a show-off who loves the attention he gets from the humans who visit the zoo. His first love is, of course, eating big, juicy steaks, which he is provided with in abundance at the zoo… so he fails to see the attraction of the wild…

Melman the giraffe also doesn’t much fancy the wild, but for a different reason – he’s a hypochondriac, and how could he possibly go without his medication and regular CT / MRI scans?!?

Gloria is a hippopotamus who also likes the zoo, though her reasons are less clear. Probably she just likes the easy life.

The Penguins (by far my favourite characters) believe the whole zoo setup is one huge conspiracy, and are always either planning or trying to perform their escape. There are 4 of them, and they’re consistently hilarious.

Voice Acting

The chief penguin, “Skipper”, is voiced by Writer-Director TomMcGrath, who obviously enjoys himself doing the voicing and is hilarious. “Just remember boys, smile and wave, smile and wave…” The moment the penguins fulfil their dream and then realise it’s not what they want is particularly funny.

Ben Stiller voices Alex and throws himself into the role, while Chris Rock was a good choice for Marty. David Schwimmer does a good job as the constantly ill Melman while Jada Pinkett Smith (whoever she is!) provides the voice of Gloria. Later on they meet some lemurs, of which Scaha Baron Cohen (the utterly risible Ali G, but her does a good job here) and Cedric the Entertainer provide the voices of the king and his aide. The voice acting is good overall but in places is perhaps a little sub-standard. No complaints really though.

Animation

The animation is very good, with the movement being fairly fluid and the lip-synching quite realistic. While the characters themselves aren’t particularly detailed, some of the background and environmental graphics are simply stunning.

Story

The story is pretty good actually, it gets into standard Disneyesque territory in the mid to end sections but the infrequent (too infrequent in my opinion!) appearances of the penguins help to prevent it getting staid. The humour’s fairly firmly on the primitive / slapstick level, there’s not a great deal of depth (no layers) to it but it’s solid entertainment. The main plot twist is rather silly to be honest but the kids won’t notice… I don’t think they will, anyway! To me it was funny enough to make up for most of its faults, anyway.

Overall

This certainly isn’t 5-star material but I enjoyed it enough to give it 4 stars. It’s certainly more for the kids and hasn’t got the kind of humour that Toy Story 2, Finding Nemo, or even Shrek had for adults to enjoy, but it’s not something adults would hate watching. (Ok if they had to see it every day for 5 weeks they would, but that applies to most films! :-D) The storyline is too straightforward for the characters to have much depth and without the penguins it would probably only have been 3 stars though.

Rant

If you’ll allow me to get on my soapbox for a moment…

One thing that did irritate me about this cartoon (and other cartoons, film, and in fact entertainment in general) is the continuing outlook of violence towards males being funny, particularly if perpetrated by females. Alex being whacked repeatedly with a large stick by Gloria who is trying to get a spider off him and an old woman attacking him and the other male animals (though not, of course, Gloria) when they’re trying to escape is supposed to be funny… hmmm…. What does this say about our society? (Sorry, this is just something that has irked me for years, it’s not particularly about Madagascar…) anyway, now that’s out of my system I’ll leave you in peace! :-P

Other Details

Rating: U (UK), PG for mildlanguage, crude humour, and some thematic elements (USA) [ I don’t know if there’s any difference between the UK and USA releases. ]

Runtime: 86 minutes

Nominations:

Best Animation / Family Film – “Golden Trailer”
Choice Movie: Animated / Computer Generated – “Teen Choice Award”

Official Site

http://www.madagascar-themovie.com/main.php

See Also:

My Top Ten Animated Movies


Recommended:
Yes

Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children up Ages 8