Happy Feet Two

The sequel to the Academy Award®-winning animated smash hit "Happy Feet," titled "Happy Feet Two," returns audiences to the magnificent landscape of Antarctica. Mumble, the Master of Tap, faces a problem as his tiny son, Erik, is choreo-phobic and reluctant to dance. Determined to find his own path, Erik runs away and encounters the Mighty Sven, a penguin who can fly, leaving Mumble struggling to compete with this charismatic new role model.

As the world is shaken by powerful forces, Erik learns of his father's "guts and grit" as Mumble brings together the penguin nations and a diverse array of creatures, from tiny krill to giant elephant seals, to put things right. The sequel, set a few years after the 2006 original, follows Mumble (voiced by Elijah Wood), now married to Gloria (Pink) and the father of Erik (Ava Acres), a chick who is afraid to dance.

When Erik witnesses the puffin Mighty Sven (Hank Azaria) and his cult-like following, which preaches that if you believe it, it can happen, he decides to learn how to fly. However, an unexplained seismic event causes a glacier to shift, trapping Gloria and all the other emperor penguins. Mumble, Erik, and two other chicks must rescue them before they starve.

The film's narrative quickly becomes entangled in various subplots involving elephant seals, skua gulls, human explorers, and a pair of renegade krill (voiced by Brad Pitt and Matt Damon). The motion-capture animation, while adequate, struggles to convincingly depict the dancing penguins, with snow and water splashing around to hide the lack of contact with the ground plane.

The vocal performances feature a discordant mix of accents, including African-American, Latino, and British penguins, surfer-dude krill, Australian seals, and "fugeddaboutit" Jersey Shore seagulls. The presence of human actors who appear briefly to help the trapped penguins and then disappear adds to the jarring nature of the film.

Despite the standard-issue poop and snot jokes, the nonstop nattering fails to leaven the overall experience. "Happy Feet Two" confirms 2011 as the year of the unnecessary sequel in American animation, as it struggles to capture the magic of the original while introducing a multitude of new characters and storylines that ultimately detract from the core narrative.

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