Pros: Entertaining visually, fun supporting characters, with a pretty complex theme for a kids' movie.
Cons: Protagonists are kinda blah, and many attempts at humor aren't that effective.
The Bottom Line: If you have kids, you could do worse than MADAGASCAR. It illustrates the nature vs. nurture debate in surprisingly complex terms for a family film, and is fairly entertaining too.
Early on in MADAGASCAR, all the animals are escaping from the Central Park Zoo. Following behind the pack are two monkeys. One exclaims to the other, "Tom Wolfe is appearing at Lincoln Center!" and then, responding to his silent partner's signed inquiry, says, "well of course we'll fling poo at him." Aside from mixing an unexpected reference to a literary figure with scatological humor, this exchange also goes to demonstrate the nature vs. nurture debate at the center of the film's storyline. As cultured as these monkeys are (particularly by simian standards), they remains prisoners of their natures- monkeys want to fling poo, zebras yearn to bound through the tall grass, and lions crave the flesh of other animals.
It's this final example that represents the film's primary conflict. In the Central Park Zoo, Alex the lion (voiced by Ben Stiller) is the star attraction, a pampered prima donna whose image adorns most of the zoo's souvenirs, who hams it up for the crowd, and is treated to a stack of thick steaks in the middle of his nightly mane-grooming. However, when he and his fellow animals find themselves back in the wild following their out-of-the-zoo excursion, Alex finds life somewhat more difficult. No longer treated to thick cuts of beef on a daily basis, he begins to see all the other animals around him as prey (in a nod to old Warner Brothers cartoons, he sees them as walking steaks), and this puts no small strain on his friendships with his former zoo buddies. Taking it hardest is Marty the zebra (Chris Rock) who was the first of the gang to yearn for greener pastures in the first place.
MADAGASCAR is by no means a great movie, but it's enjoyable, going easy on the pop-culture references that have wrecked previous Dreamworks Animation efforts like the SHREK films and especially SHARK TALE. Which is not to say that there aren't any allusions made to older movies or other recognizable phenomena, the most memorable example being a dream sequence in which Alex finds himself falling into a bed full of steaks, replacing the rose petals of AMERICAN BEAUTY (naturally, the filmmakers include the original film's music during the scene). But thankfully, the film doesn't go overboard, nor is it content to stick with the old standbys that everyone is sick of by now.
I was also entertained by the look of the film. Dreamworks Animation is no match for Pixar when it comes to crafting enchanting animated worlds, but here they don’t really aim for the transcendent. Instead, they give the film a flat, cartoon-y style that reminded me not so much of other computer-animated movies as the stylized look of THE EMPEROR'S NEW GROOVE (which is looking more and more like Disney's last gasp of inspiration). I was certainly more taken with the style of MADAGASCAR than with the faux-storybook look of the SHREK films, which were too glossy of look and clear of line to pull off the style.
My favorite scene in the film, from a visual standpoint, was one in which the four protagonists- Alex, Marty, Melman the giraffe (David Schwimmer), and Gloria the hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith)- discover one at a time that they've each been placed in shipping crates. In one unbroken shot, we first see Alex wake up to discover his plight, and then as each of the other characters awakens thereafter, his portion of the screen fades in from black until we see the four of them in their separate crates within the frame- the punchline being that Melman's crate has been placed with his head pointed downward.
Though MADAGASCAR is charming and diverting, it's hardly perfect. The voice cast, for all its talent, is fairly inconsequential here. Stiller and Rock are particularly disappointing- both have distinctive comedic personas, but neither really gets a chance to do that much with them. Pinkett Smith and Schwimmer's vocal turns are more standard-issue, though that's understandable in Schwimmer's case considering that Melman the giraffe is less interesting as a character than as a framing phenomenon. At various points we see Melman's head in the foreground and his body in the background, or with his head on one side and his body on the other when the four heroes are grouped together. The peripheral characters are much more fun here, especially the psychotic penguins (any kid who has seen WINGED MIGRATION knows how awesome penguins are) and the party-animal lemurs, featuring Sacha Baron Cohen (aka Ali G) as the Julius the Lemur King, whose voice is a cross between a rabbi and Peter Sellers in THE PARTY.
All in all, MADAGASCAR is a good one for the kids, and not a bad entertainment for their parents either. While the younger ones could potentially get a little scared when Alex begins to turn into a predator, the film by and large is fairly genial and light. And if the film gets kids asking questions about the nature vs. nurture issue, then so much the better.
When four pampered animals from New York s Central Park Zoo accidentally find themselves shipwrecked on the exotic island of Madagascar, they discover...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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