Review of Madagascar (2005) by Markb. — 23 Oct 2005

I waited forever to see this popular CGI-fest because Robots and Shark Tale left me cringing in abject terror at any piece of 3-D computer-generated animation NOT bearing the Pixar label...but the short subject featuring the Madagascar penguins that preceded Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit turned out to be surprisingly bearable (if immediately forgettable compared to the feature that followed), so I ponied up my $2.

50 to finally check it out at a discount theater, and guess what? This turned out to be by far the worst of the sorry bunch: a film so relentlessly shrill, assaultive, headache-inducing, self-satisfied and aggressively unfunny that it ALMOST made me want to re-evaluate Shark Tale, which at least had some well-cast voices, and Robots, which boasted some impressively elaborate animation set-ups.

(Notice that I said ALMOST; life is already too short, I just blew 80 minutes on this, and I'm sure there are sock drawers that need rearranging somewhere.) This completely heartless, soulless and utterly disjointed tale of city zoo animals forced back into the wild, where they have to face their primal instincts and temptations certainly had potential, but stampedes it completely beneath an endless cacaphony of pop-culture riffs and movie references (I hesitate to even call most of them "jokes"; they're so joyless and perfunctory that they're far more accurately described as checklist items) that take the place of a cohesive script; this is exactly the same chop-suey corporate writing approach that turned The Simpsons from what was at one time the greatest TV show on the air to the completely unwatchable farrago it is today.

I was shocked to see Hans Zimmer's name credited to the music; his work may have been one of several contributions to turning The Lion King from an animated kiddie musical into a dramatic movie of real heft, but Madagascar is so wall-to-wall loaded with push-button soundbites from TV and movies (the worst example: the Hawaii Five-O theme IMMEDIATELY followed by the Chariots of Fire theme) that I honestly don't recall any background music that Zimmer contributed! I'm certainly well aware that the history of popular animation--from Warner Bros.

Looney Tunes cartoons to Rocky and Bullwinkle to even the early years of The Flintstones--includes many examples of simultaneously appealing to kids on one level while pitching jokes to adults that the little ones won't catch (the "NUTS" gag in the Wallace & Gromit movie is a delightful contemporary example of this) .

..but Madagascar tips the scale so far one way that it made me start to understand Michael Medved's appreciation of Barney the Dinosaur playing 100% to his wee audience and completely chucking the smart-aleck postmodernism, especially during the truly hateful bit about cute little creatures being devoured in the jungle that made one little guy in my audience burst into sobs.

The character design is harsh and repellent, with the lemurs' egg-yolk eyes in particular being...well, an eyesore; the animation, especially of people and crowds, is frequently inept; of the voices, Chris Rock comes off as the most overbearing, Jada Pinkett Smith the least, and most of the others far closer to Rock than Smith.

Some have argued that Madagascar's uber-rapid-fire, yock-on-top-of-yock approach carries on the tradition of what Tex Avery did so successfully in the 1940s and 1950s, but there IS a crucial difference: Avery's features worked because he limited them to 7 minutes.

But then, Madagascar is hardly a movie that respects its betters: early on, a couple of monkeys discuss flinging their poo at Tom Wolfe. Now we can agree to disagree about I Am Charlotte Simmons, but for a group of hack committee sitcom writers to make a comment like that about the master satirist who wrote the brilliant novels The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man In Full (whether he wears a white suit or not) merely underscores the wise old agage: throw one piece of poo, get 1,463,892 pieces of poo thrown back at yourself.