Madagascar

Saw Madagascar (thanks, Paul!) I enjoyed it. It was a fairly goofy movie about a quartet of zoo animals who decide to run off to the wild. Despite being pampered like movie stars, the Zebra feels they are sliding into complacency and a sort of light decadence. He escapes and, after shenanigans, winds up Madagascar, which is portrayed as a cartoon tropical paradise. Once there, they discover that wilderness is not all it's cracked up to be and that the pampering was actually saving them from strife and hardship. This is particularly evident when we the audience realizes that Alex the lion has no food, and the Zebra is just looking juicier and juicier.

The film is pretty funny. There's an early gag where the lion has something stuck in his teeth only to reveal, Surprise!, that it's a birthday present for the Zebra! The absurdity of it made me laugh. There's a few weaker jokes as well (there are about four nut-shot gags) but there was a slow but steady stream of good jokes as well (or at least jokes that made me laugh. My sense of humor is kind of strange though.) There's a quartet of inexplicably super-competent penguins who are always fairly funny and a duo of monkeys with British accents who exist mainly to give pretentious blowhards like me a cheap reference-chuckle. The references are also gloriously scatter-shot. An obvious Planet of the Apes gag is stretched unto hilarity and there's a reference to American Beauty that seemed kind of nicely obscure.

The film is a bit formulaic however. The penguins are the mandatory delightful B-plot, there's a sassy hippo who acts as the matronly voice of reason to the rest of the protagonists' madness, there's a scene-stealing lemur with a goofy accent. These elements all feel a bit trite to me. They're well-done (except for the hippo who really felt like the voice of plot most of the time) but not new. There were times I laughed or felt bad for the characters or was delighted, but I was never really surprised. It's also not really about anything. Stuff just happens until it doesn't anymore. This is not the end of the world however. I've seen a lot of movies and it takes a lot to surprise me and not all films must have a point. This film is a well-crafted machine. It's a machine whose pieces I've seen before, but it runs smooth and does the job. This film a delightful, light bit of fluff.