Reykjavík Grapevine - 05.08.2005, Qupperneq 46

Okay, Madagascar came to Iceland late,
so we had already heard earfuls of “it’s too
superficial” and “just a bunch of CGI”
before the movie got here. This is how it
goes with Dreamworks movies, viewed
as the slow cousin of Pixar, producers of
The Incredibles, Toy Story and Finding
Nemo.
Lucky for us, those who import
movies to Iceland seem to only take on
movies that get abysmal reviews: yes, last
summer we got Punisher, Cat Woman
and Alexander on as many screens as
possible.
But Madagascar has been done
wrong, just as Ice Age, and Shark Tale
were done wrong before that. First, let’s
take the intelligence of a film named
Madagascar. True, the film’s writers
act on the unusual assumption that
Madagascar, a country of 15 million
with a remarkable archaeological history
going back 2000 years, is uninhabited by
humans. But on the bright side, they get
this key point: they identify that there is
a place called Madagascar, that it is an
island, and that it contains lemurs and
fossae—the amazing localized fauna that
prove so useful in an evolution discussion.
Getting a child to talk about lemurs is a
step in the right direction. Along those
lines, if the child is a little older, you
pique the young one’s interest by telling
him that courtesy of the BBC, you can
watch fossae eat lemurs online, or you can
watch fossae have screaming wild fossae
sex. (We found archives of both at www.
arkive.org.)
Have we sold you on the intelligence
thing? No? Well how about the other
aspect that Dreamworks does right: they
keep their references entirely in the low
brow—a possible exception was a Tom
Wolfe reference in Madagascar. But
that was evened out by the context. Two
monkeys escape the zoo, and they discuss
seeing Tom Wolfe do a reading. The
one monkey, interpreting the other’s sign
language, says, “Are we going to throw
poop at him? Of course.” Sheer comic
brilliance.
The favourite low brow reference
includes Saturday morning cartoons--
Hanna Barbera’s Help! It’s the Hair Bear
Hour -- is all over Madagascar’s opening
half hour, just as Shark Tale owed a lot to
that the high point of Saturday morning
cartoons, Jabberjaw. And kudos go to
Sacha Baron Cohen (Ali G). Playing
a party-animal king of the lemurs,
Mr. Cohen pulls a direct imitation of
Peter Sellers’ vilest, and funniest, comic
moment—his role as Indian stereotype
Hrundi V. Bakshi in Blake Edward’s The
Party (1968).
One reason for strongly
recommending Madagascar comes from
our perusal of Screen It! (www.screenit.
com) a website dedicated to providing
information for concerned parents, (with
sponsorship from Zoloft and Propel
Fitness Water). Screen It! warns parents
of “Disrespectful/ Bad Attitude” in the
film: “Alex [the lion] develops a bad
attitude toward Marty [the Zebra] and
the others when they don’t follow his
idea… He also tries to eat Marty, but
that’s more out of nearly uncontrollable
instincts/ urges rather than purposeful
malevolence.” The website also warns of
20 acts of violence, which qualifies it for a
“moderate” rating.
And of course the biggest reason for
recommending Madagascar is really the
use of poop jokes. There are two of them
in the film, and we are proud to state
that we have just progressed in emotional
maturity to Freud’s anal stage.
Movie R
eviews
Come On, People. How Deep Do Your
Cartoons Have to Be?
MADAGASCAR
By Bart Cameron
Alex the Lion will eat you, but his instincts are to blame.
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