PENGUINS OF MADAGASCAR (2014)

PENGUINS OF MADAGASCAR (2014). Eric Darnell, Simon J. Smith, dir. John Aboud story and script — et al. (see IMDb for details. USA: DreamWorks Animation, Pacific Data Images (prod.) / Twentieth Century Fox (most dist., including US), 2014. 92 min. estimated budget US$132M.

Computer animation in 2-D and 3-D, classified on IMDb as Animation | Adventure | Comedy, to which one may add fantasy, beast fable (almost all the characters are non-human talking animals), and (hence) ironic techno-thriller. Significant here for the high-tech super-villain/super-operative gadgets assigned strongly to the villains and to the competitors with the featured Penguins: the allies of apparently all vertebrates, a strike team of what the DreamWorks Animation PR folk describe as the "chic undercover organization, The North Wind," under the leadership of " handsome and husky Agent Classified (we could tell you his name, but then...you know)," voiced, significantly, by Benedict Cumberbatch. The featured penguins are far more into inter-personal relationships — mostly penguin and "band of brothers"ish — than technology, although the coda to the action has them joyously flying with jetpacks. There are also nicely comic uses of the motif of the superimposition of the electronic on the organic — here "spheniscidal" — and threatening containment within mechanisms. The runt of the Penguin crew, Private, is attached to a device that produces a ray that makes animals monstrous, helping reverse the effect as a source of extreme cuteness, with the ray directed toward penguins that have been sucked up by street-cleaner strength vacuuming vehicles. It may be significant for the theme of high-tech that the villain is a technophilic octopus who can pass for a human scientist. It is probably significant for students of art history that even as the perfecting of photography was followed by abstraction in painting, so the perfecting of CGI, so that great realism is now possible, has been followed by films like PENGUINS, where cost isn't much of an object, and the esthetic choice has been made to have cartoon animals look cartoonish, here in a film that deals seriously with the issue of animal cuteness (for which cf. and far more contrast the cyberpunkified attack penguins in BATMAN RETURNS).[HTTP://FHOP.FULLONFLATWHITE.COM/WP-CONTENT/UPLOADS/2013/05/BATMAN-RETURNS2.JPG]

5. DRAMA, RDE, 01/XII/14