You know, for whatever reason the trailers for this film didn’t do a whole lot for me. But in retrospect, I’m not sure why. Perhaps I was suffering a bit from what I heard most people saying during said trailers, “enough with the penguins already.” And I happen to rather like penguins, so I can get what frustrated everyone else. It was a Hollywood fad that kinda wore people down. And that’s a shame, because I really liked this movie. Frankly, the movie barely needs to even be populated with penguins. It could almost be any animal it wanted to be with a little tweaking here and there. They make the penguins work, though, so it’s well and good enough that penguins are what they used. So, did I like this movie better than Happy Feet? Yeah, definitely. Happy Feet, despite some outstanding moments and elements, was an uneven movie overall that had a number of elements that just didn’t work.

Writing: The strengths of this script are in clever little touches and fantastic dialog. Plotting is extremely basic and by-the-numbers. In fact, almost any casual moviegoer will be way ahead of the plot, knowing precisely where it’s headed. What’s most amazing is that this is one of those extremely rare movies where it’s actually kinda charming the way they set things up so you know precisely where it’s headed. It’s far more about enjoying the characters and dialog along the way.

Production: The movie is setup in straight forward documentary style, playing directly against the kind of slick CGI production of Happy Feet. The animation is actually very impressive, but more for how natural and casual it all feels. That’s not to say that there isn’t any particularly impressive CGI elements to be found, because there are. In particular, the water animation is amazing. The wonderful quality of the animation is just as much how it moves and feels rather than looks. It’s all very subtle and casual.

Cast: Here’s one of the major strong points of the movie. Shia LaBeouf is perfectly fine in the lead role. It’s not a breakout performance or anything, but it gets the job done well. Zooey Deschanel, one of my favorite actresses, is fun as the romantic interest with an amusingly subtle performance. Jon Heder is surprisingly hilarious as Chicken Joe. James Woods is perfectly cast as opportunist manager Reggie Belafonte. But the true highlight of the voice casting is the great Jeff Bridges as Big Z, who is often times channeling his landmark performance as Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski for the role. The movie is certainly amusing up until his character joins in the fun, then it becomes a great romp.

Music: In something of a strange twist, composer Mychael Danna is chosen to score this movie. As somebody who specializes in intimate character dramas, I wonder if they chose him to help ground the documentary feel of the film. Still, Danna’s score is quite good. It is the one area where this movie has an impossible job at trying to be as good or better than Happy Feet, which featured a brilliant score by John Powell. Danna’s work has some nice flair when it needs to and is overall a very good score.

Incidentally, there’s a hilarious write-up at Movieweb that’s worth reading about the amusing “Based on a true story” tagline the film uses.