Teach your children well

We’re halfway through Happy Feet.  Up to the halfway mark, I wasn’t really liking it.  It’s got a lot of wailing soul style music, and that’s not my kind of sound.  And considering that it’s a kids’ movie, I found the song choices rather surprising, since a lot of them are amazingly sexual in content.  Fortunately, my kids are still so innocent it went over their heads, but it sure made me uncomfortable.  (Mr. Bookworm, good liberal that he is, was “charmed.”)  I also found the visuals, while sophisticated, dizzying.  I mean, there’s only so much you can get out of animating hundreds of thousands of penguins.  The story seemed to be the usual banal Hollywood children’s movie:  misfit, who finds equally misfit friends, gets girl.

Halfway through the movie, though, right where we turning it off for bedtime, it suddenly took a turn for the politically icky.  It turns out that the misfit hero’s community is made up of right wing fundamentalist penguins (I kid you not), who believe that the only thing between them and disaster is strict worship of their penguin God and the stamping out of all non-conformity.  They become ever more fanatic as their food source slows, attributing its failure to the presence in their midst of a nonconformist penguin (our hero, of course). The last scene I saw had him announcing that he was going to prove, not that a failure of penguin religion is the problem, but that there’s a greater, more evil force even than someone following his bliss:  MAN!  The far Left PC-ness of this movie (inappropriately sexy songs, attacks on traditional religion, self-referential animism, and hostility towards humans) is truly amazing.

Interestingly, although my kids picked up on my husband’s enthusiasm (and, frankly, they’ll watch anything), they were at first resistant to watching it at all because so many of their kid friends panned it — said it was a terrible movie.  It’s nice to know that, even if my kids don’t have much taste, their friends do.