I've just watched the DVD version of Happy Feet` animation by George Miller of the punk-rock action classic, "Mad Max" fame. I did not see talking-pig movies, "Babe" or the darker follow-up, "Babe: Pig in the City." It was masterful animal whimsy and very close to March of the Penguins. Happy Feet is an animated film - but it’s not a cartoon.

It is cutting edge computer-animation that utilizes the art skills of Animal Logic based at Fox Studios in Sydney, Australia and Venice, California that is placed into a conventional narrative.

It is a class show. The visuals of the Antarctic landscapes and the zoom-outs of Earth hanging in space are stunning, the use of the music is often inspired (eg., the use of the Beach Boys 'Do It Again'), whilst the environmental message is the need to regulate the overfishing of the Antarctic oceans. All of this is structured around tap dancing. It's too dark for some US conservatives who see environmental propaganda designed to indoctrinate children. They see it as an animated 'Inconvenient Truth'. Maybe they don't like the way that the penguin elders run the colony as if they were a fundamentalist religious community.

Well penguins may actually die if humans starve them to death through overfishing the Antarctic oceans. The conservatives think that it’s mean to children to make a movie that admit the environmental damage could kill off the penguins. When they are wound up they see it as anti-human propaganda. Presumably they hanker for the the good ol’ days of Disney when humans always had some moral superiority over animals in the movies, and were never, ever shown as a force of destruction in the innocent lives of animals.

It's whacky. Its as if they Enmperor Penguins had been listening to U.S. radio for decades. We started with a penguin Marilyn Monroe [voice of Nicole Kidman] singing a Prince song being serenaded by a penguin Elvis Presley [voice of Hugh Jackman]).