FILMBRATS - REVIEWS

It’s Marty the Zebra’s tenth birthday. All his life he’s been cooped up in Central Park Zoo with his animal pals. He’s starting to wonder what it might be like to live out in the wild. So, because of this midlife crisis, he ventures out into the city to find his way to the closest thing to the wild he can find: Connecticut. His friends, a sassy hippo, a hypochondriac giraffe and a superstar lion, wake up to see that he’s left them and thus search after him. Will any of them ever really find what they’re looking for?

Dreamworks’ latest entry into the animation field really fails to capture the same atmosphere or liveliness of movies past. The big problem is that the story just isn’t there, and neither are the jokes. Mark Burton, a relatively accomplished British TV writer and Billy Frolick, who’s done virtually nothing, wrote the dry, uninteresting script. This movie would have been a lot better were it not for the main characters. They really just bog the whole thing down with mindless exposition and multiple failed joke attempts. Even though they are voiced by funny men Ben Stiller (Alex the Lion) and Chris Rock (Marty the Zebra), I doubt I laughed at anything they said. The only worthwhile comedic moments come from the soldier/spy-like penguins and their conquest to reach Antartica – which really had the greatest potential to carry the movie – and the Lemur clan, headed by King Julian (voiced by the talented Sacha Baron Cohen of “Da Ali G Show”).

Computer animated films usually pride themselves on their realism and attention to detail. “Madagascar,” however, looks extremely cartoony. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s definitely off-putting. The characters all move very rapidly and sometimes in impossible manners, which makes the computer-generated movement too fast to be fluid. The character designs were slightly verging on caricatures of the animals as well, but because it’s only slightly, it’s not as good. If they’re going to exaggerate the animals to downplay the realism, then they should go all the way with it. If you’re going to have cartoony movements and scenarios, then go all the way with it. Don’t bother so much with textures and lighting and meticulous details. It all seemed phoned in to me. The only really well-done animated sequence was when Alex was hit with the tranquilizer gun and went into a brief psychedelic episode, however they ruined that by repeating it for a bad joke just seconds later.

As a kids movie, it’ll probably keep the little ones in their seats. They’ll find the little lemurs cute, especially the sacrificial doe-eyed baby, and who knows, maybe they’ll even be young enough to find some of the main characters’ lame jokes funny. But any adults should probably just drop the kids off and find something else to do, because there’ll be very little you’ll find interesting or entertaining. It’s just a typical kids flick, if not less than, but the problem is we’ve come to expect a lot more from them these days.

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