Family/Animation PG Running time: 1:39
IMDB rating: 5.9 Aspect: Wide; Languages: English, French, Spanish, Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Swedish; Subtitles: English, French, Spanish, Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Swedish; Audio: DD 5.1
The sequel Happy Feet 2 begins a few years after the 2006 original ended: Mumble (voiced by Elijah Wood) is now married to Gloria (Pink) and the father of Erik (Ava Acres), a chick who's afraid to dance. When Erik sees the puffin Mighty Sven (Hank Azaria), he decides he can learn to fly: Sven is the leader of a cult that preaches if you believe it, it can happen. 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. What begins as a familiar story about a diffident chick quickly becomes needlessly and hopelessly mired in 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 is adequate at best, with snow and water splashing around the dancing penguins to hide the fact that their feet aren't making contact with the ground plane. Endless tracking shots over the cracking glaciers recall the second Ice Age movie. The vocal performances feature a discordant mélange of accents, with African-American, Latino, and British penguins, surfer-dude krill, Australian seals, and "fugeddaboutit" Jersey Shore seagulls.
