Happy Feet 2

Rating: **

Years have passed and Mumble (Wood),the penguin who couldn’t sing but could tap dance like none other,and Gloria with the beautiful voice now have a baby of their own. However,their Erik (Acres) sees no reason to dance at all.

So off he runs with two friends,following Ramon the loverboy penguin (Williams) to his native Adele. There Erik is impressed by Sven the Sventastic (Azaria),a penguin that can fly. It takes much persuasion for Mumble to convince Erik to come back home,though he returns with many Sven-isms,including: “If you want it,you have to will it. If you will it,it will be yours.”

While they are returning,the big ice mass that is their world shifts,large chunks break off and the entire landscape changes. They encounter an elephant seal on their way who,astonishingly for a children’s film,almost dies in front of his babies.

Happy Feet 2 has several such hazy sequences never propelled towards one concrete story. One way of inducing the coming-of-age of Happy Feet could have been to have Mumble,Erik and his friends look for their lost family through their new world. However,after a promising build-up,the film places them quickly on top of a cliff looking down at their entire Emperor Penguin swarm trapped at the bottom with no access to the ocean,their source of food.

In the rest of the movie,the two groups have a shouting conversation across that cliff,making vague rescue plans,accompanied by an inordinate number of songs and excuses for dance thrown in.

Pitt and Damon feature as two breakaway plankton out to explore the world. But this sub-plot never achieves the heights of the squirrel-acorn story of Ice Age that it is obviously aspiring to emulate.

Bigger and vaster than the prequel,Happy Feet 2 nonetheless struggles to fill its shoes.

shalini.langer@expressindia.com