Happy Feet's director George Miller's last movie for a family audience was Babe: Pig in the City. It was a divisive movie -- some loved it, others were just baffled by it -- but it achieved those reactions by being surreal in its tone, an odd mix of wacky comedy and some very scary, cruel moments. However one responded to it, most could agree that the movie was very different from what anyone might've had in mind for it. And that's perhaps the best way I can start describing Happy Feet.

Happy Feet is constructed from the usual material for a big studio animated feature these days, featuring famous actors for the voices, a plot with lessons about individuality and/or family, and 3-D computer-generated visuals employed for making animals talk. But it benefits from an approach with just the right amount of uniqueness to it so that it becomes hard to lump it in with the slew of other animated projects from this and recent years. Part of this is similar to Babe: Pig in the City -- the film contains elements of wackiness, but overall it's subdued by a greater, more serious and somewhat darker tone. It's also a relief that noticeably less irony and sarcasm than usual are used in the storytelling here.

In addition, the movie's primary featured animals, Emperor penguins, are rendered to very closely resemble the real-life version of the Antarctic birds, right down to their living behaviors; their anthropomorphization is not so conspicuously caricatural. And then -- this is where it gets strange. The filmmakers decided to give these creatures a peculiar trait: in order to fit into their society, they all have to know how to sing. And from this idea, we have many scenes of (realistic-looking) penguins just singing, singing to themselves or to each other, singing songs of every style -- and almost all of them are known popular hits, as if they'd been listening to U.S. radio for decades (to get us started, a penguin Marilyn Monroe [voice of Nicole Kidman] singing a Prince song is serenaded by a penguin Elvis Presley [voice of Hugh Jackman]). And the penguins don't do it as if they're performing musical numbers in a Broadway show, necessarily. Most of the time, they just sing, and they get interrupted by another one singing, only to get interrupted again, or to have the onlookers join in for background vocals. It's Antarctica, and they're just singing like crazy!

Naturally, our protagonist -- a young penguin named Mumble (voice of Elijah Wood), whom we follow from egg (of the aforementioned Marilyn and Elvis) to young adult -- can't sing. But he can tap dance like there's no tomorrow. Unfortunately for him, dancing is frowned upon, so therein lies the conflict. However, Miller and his crew use the opportunity to sneak in a little subversiveness -- the penguin elders run the colony as if they were a religious community, with the head elder (voice of Hugo Weaving, with Irish accent) strictly enforcing the lines. There's a criticism about dogma and how it's destructive towards those who fall outside its accepted bounds (in a society where all are expected to sing, one is born to dance; first they try to change him, then they eventually excommunicate him -- use your imagination to find real-life parallels).

Although this may sound anti-church, the film works its way around that issue by feeling very spiritual, especially with the constant use of music. The way the songs flow into each other is indicative of how the story moves itself along. Happy Feet doesn't feel hung up on exposition -- it doesn't wring its hands (flippers?) over making sure its morals are clearly imparted, or what's going to happen next in the plot. It glides from one scene to the next, and it's eager to display its virtuosity in a few chase scenes and plenty of dancing scenes. The tap dancing scenes have the most juice, and it's also where the movie feels the most natural, like nothing needs explaining and everything just flows. It becomes too easy to imagine that this is how the concept began -- someone took a real penguin model and made it tap dance, and they said, "let's a make a movie out of this!"

But they didn't stop there. Happy Feet is March of the Penguins (it treats the documentary as if watching it was a prerequisite, so it doesn't have to explain why the moms go to sea while the dads huddle in a storm) meets Moulin Rouge, and then on top of that it contains serious undertones which address religious intolerance, diversity, and ecological concerns. It's not perfect -- a group of Adélie penguins are presented as comedic Mexican stereotypes, which is tempered by the fact that they're heroic and inclusive, but made worse by the use of Robin Williams as the voice of the lead amigo (were Cheech Marin and George Lopez busy or something?).

If one just looks at its skeleton, yes, this film follows a story pattern too similar to the stories of its animated siblings. But it's the flesh on the skeleton that counts here, and it's delivered singing and dancing.

(Released by Warner Bros. Pictures and rated "PG" for mild peril and rude humor.)

Review also posted at www.windowtothemovies.com.