HAPPY FEET 2: No Girls(‘ POV) Allowed [Philosophical Monday]

Le sigh. I wanted to love HAPPY FEET 2. I truly enjoyed the first one, and this sequel pretty much had me at baby penguins singing “Mama Said Knock You Out.” However, three things derailed that enjoyment:

1) The super-violent Warner Bros. Sylvester and Tweety short that ran before the movie. It made me realize how much better children’s TV is now and that I should always pay attention to the MPA ratings. I assumed that because HF2 is a movie about dancing, singing penguins, it would be rated G. But when I checked the parental rating afterwards, there was a PG staring right back at me.

2) Our daughter literally walked out after the first 30 minutes. She loved the last Winnie the Pooh movie, but after the “new experience” mesmerization wore off during HF2, she was like, “Okay, I’m out of here,” and headed for the door. CH chased after her, and texted me outside the movie to stay and finish watching it with my MIL, since we’d paid for the tickets. She was refusing to come back in and he was going to take her to the park.

3) There’s nothing here for girls. I watched the original HAPPY FEET before I had a child. That movie had one main POV, and was pretty much a Hero’s Journey story, so I barely even noticed the lack of female perspective. However, this time, the movie spreads into an ensemble story and we get many main POVs — none of which are the girls.

In HAPPY FEET 2 the women are there to be desired by the male penguins and to nurture the male and boy penguins. Seriously, the Gloria character gets one solo song for pure entertainment, and then she spends the rest of the movie using her talent to either nurture her misfit son or encourage her misfit husband. At one point a little girl penguin gets tapped for an important mission because she is such a fast runner — that mission is to go find a certain male penguin and tell him to organize some back-up for the central problem they’re dealing with. We don’t get to see any part of her journey. Just like every other female in this movie, she isn’t given any inner life or layers. They are all only there to help, be gazed upon, or nurture. The males do all the heavy lifting. They come up with all the ideas, they drive the movie forward, they get every single bit of conflict, and they are provide the resolution.

It’s just depressing that in 2011, sitting in an audience that was over 50% female, to see a modern children’s movie make so little room for girls. In the millenial “princess” movies, there are always two points of view: hers and his. They both get to do big stuff and overcome huge obstacles. But the creators of HAPPY FEET 2 seem to be okay with presenting an ensemble piece with absolutely no female perspective. Wow.

By the end of the movie, I realized that I should have taken our daughter to the park and let CH stay to watch the “boy’s flick.” There was nothing for us here.