Preschoolers and Penguins: Propoganda Pawns (Michael Medved on 'Happy Feet')

In America's ongoing culture war, with ferocious combatants grabbing every available weapon to strike at each other, innocent children and adorable penguins simultaneously qualify as collateral damage. Recent controversies involving environmental and gay-marriage messages in Hollywood cartoons and storybooks for young children show that in our current climate, even the youngest kids and the most endearing denizens of Antarctica can become targets and instruments of powerful propaganda.

On the eve of our annual holiday season, Warner Bros. released the lavish animated extravaganza Happy Feet, featuring the voices of Robin Williams, Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman and Elijah Wood in a PG-rated story about a tap-dancing penguin. The studio promoted the picture as a feel-good frolic for the whole family, featuring an endorsement quote that promised, "Adults and kids alike will be dancing in the aisles."

Unfortunately, the marketing never acknowledged the movie's unmistakably alarming, discomfiting and politically potent elements - enraging no small number of unprepared parents. The endearing creatures on screen face the deadly menace of leopard seals, killer whales and, most of all, human pollution, overconsumption and exploitation. In the advance screening I attended, one worried mother of a 5-year-old took her anxious, fretful, anguished little boy from the theater during the film's relentless scenes of cute and cuddly penguins in intense pain and deadly peril. The next week, a correspondent who called himself "MikeP29p" wrote on my website: "Unfortunately I read Michael's movie review a day too late. We took our kids ages 6 and 4 last night because they wanted to go because they saw the commercials. I thought an animated movie about penguins would be OK. One of the darkest most disturbing movies I have ever seen. Needless to say, my 4-year-old was terrified."

Even some of the premier critical advocates for Happy Feet acknowledged its nightmarish aspects, but praised them as appropriate because of the film's powerful pro-environmental messages.

In The New York Times, film critic Manohla Dargis described this animated offering as "a piercingly sad story about the devastation being visited on the natural world." She allows that director George Miller "plunges his hapless hero into a nightmare worthy of Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor. As politically pointed as it is disturbing, it is a view of hell as seen through the eyes and ears of creatures we foolishly, tragically call dumb."

Of course, many parents might not relish the idea of exposing their kiddies to a "view of hell," no matter how much they agree with a movie's propagandistic purposes - nor would they necessarily welcome a picture book for 4-year-olds that has plunged an Illinois school into the bitter debate over same-sex marriage.

A few families of students in Shiloh, a town of 11,000 people 20 miles east of St. Louis, object to the general availability of And Tango Makes Three, an illustrated storybook that loosely follows the real-life story of two male penguins at New York City's Central Park Zoo who adopted a fertilized egg and raised the chick as their own. With its enthusiastic celebration of little Tango's good fortune at possessing "two fathers," and with the narrative's fanciful suggestion that the zoo keeper "thought to himself ... they must be in love," the book clearly took a position in the ongoing arguments about same-sex coupling and homosexual families. In fact, the story concludes with the observation that Silo and Roy "discovered each other in 1996 and have been a couple ever since."

International news stories reported, however, that their partnership proved short-lived: As soon as Scrappy, a sultry, seductive female from San Diego's Sea World, arrived in their enclosure, Silo instantly took notice, straightened up and mated with the irresistible gal - leaving his guy pal behind (an outcome never described, of course, in the propagandistic story book for kids).

Despite parental requests that school librarians remove the controversial volume from the open shelves for young readers (it's designed for ages 4 to 8) and relocate it to a special section for "mature issues," school superintendent Jennifer Filyaw declared that And Tango Makes Three would stay put as an "adorable" and "age appropriate" offering.

Regardless of the aesthetic virtues (or shortcomings) of either Happy Feet or And Tango Makes Three, it's easy to see why even non-partisan parents would object to their targeting of very young children. In school and elsewhere, it makes sense to introduce preteens to ongoing debates about global warming, environmental degradation or the redefinition of marriage and family, but most mothers and fathers would prefer to spare preschoolers from such grown-up arguments.

Some adults may choose to expose the youngsters in their lives to Al Gore's powerful and skillfully crafted documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, but they will know before they go that they're taking the kids to an occasionally frightening message movie. In Happy Feet, on the other hand, you'd have no reason to expect so much unhappy and worrisome content - nor would you expect a sweet, gorgeously drawn picture book about cuddling penguins to include potentially explosive hints about gay marriage and fatherhood. With the celebrated (and controversial) book Heather Has Two Mommies, parents - if not kids - know what to expect. With And Tango Makes Three, many readers (including Lilly Del Pinto, one of the concerned parents in the fight against the book) found themselves unhappily surprised.

As children grow and develop, their natural curiosity and ongoing media exposure will lead them inevitably into divisive issues, which all conscientious parents should prepare to help explain. In the earliest stages of life, however, it makes sense to keep them protected from such conflicts and to avoid using preschoolers - and penguins - as the pawns of propaganda.

Film critic Michael Medved, author of Right Turns, hosts a nationally syndicated, daily radio talk show.

Spare the kids

Outcome Based Education was designed to create a socialist revolution through the minds of the children. The "outcome" would be a socialist society accepted by the masses without them noticing the change (which is why history lessons have been replaced by social studies in the public schools. Social change first, academics will come later)

The object is to get the kids away from parental influence as much as possible with things like day care, pre-pre-school, pre-school, day long kindergarten, before school programs, after school programs, week end programs, summer programs. There's to be breakfast, lunch, and dinner served so the children no longer need parents. They're to install doctors, social workers, psychiatrists, dentists, etc. within the school, so the teachers are seen as the primary care takers to abolish parental power in the minds of the children.

The goal is social change through the children. The children will be tomorrows new adults. What they're taught for 12 years will seem normal to them when they enter the outside world. They'll be socialists and never know what a free Republic is or ever was.

That's why parents are losing control over their families, and why the public schools are being seen as indoctrination centers. People know something terrible is happening in their schools, but feel helpless to do anything to stop it. Some parents have simply chose to remove their kids from the brain washing, but thousands of new socialists are being trained every year.

Support school choice. The graduates in 2000 were the first group of children who went through the entire reprogramming system. (Outcome Based Education is also known as The Goals 2000 Program.)

Ron Sunseri was elected to the house of representatives in 1990 and was a member when the Oregon Education Reform Act was introduced in 1991. Concerned about the ramification of such legislation, Ron launched an in-depth research effort to determine the effects of Outcome Based Education. Ron continued to lead the fight to repeal this type of socialist education reform. He lost that fight.

Here's Medved's review of the film:

http://michaelmedved.townhall.com/blog/g/5094f586-fed7-4cf4-872c-d20b94c78024

Friday, November 17, 2006
Don't Be Misled by "Crappy Feet"!
Posted by: Michael Medved at 2:16 AM

Hollywood produces plenty of lousy movies but the releases that bother me most are those that feature false and misleading advertising. The new animated extravaganza “Happy Feet” features some of the most dishonest marketing of 2006, and deserves special condemnation for it mendacious mediocrity.

The film features the voices of A-list Hollywood stars --- Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, Elijah Wood, Robin Williams—and the trailers and TV ads suggest a fun-for-the-whole-family romp with some of the awe-inspiring, wonder-of-creation views of penguin peculiarities that made “March of the Penguins” one of the top grossing documentaries in history.

While the computer-generated animation often fills the screen with visually spectacular Antarctic vistas, the story and characters will irritate most potential viewers for several reasons:

1) This may be the darkest, most disturbing feature length animated film ever offered by a major studio. At least 80% of the film’s running time shows its penguin characters in pain or danger. Scenes of terrifying leopard seals and killer whales trying to devour the protagonist and his friends are so intense as to guarantee nightmares; the PG rating is a joke since the film is wildly inappropriate for young viewers under seven (and their parents). Rather than sending you out of the theatre with a song in your heart (there’s a big focus in the script on “heart songs”) the movie produces feelings of fright, discomfort, even guilt. The title “Happy Feet,” suggesting a feel-good frolic, could hardly be more deceptive for a deeply ill-considered project that will make most audience members feel gloomier and more depressed than they did when they entered the theatre.

2) The propagandistic theme suggests that the biggest menace for the lovable penguins is the human race --- stealing the fish on which the birds depend, or ruining planet earth through pollution and global warming. There’s also scenes of a penguin captured for a zoo and tormented to the point of mental incapacity by unfeeling people Many classic animated films (even “Bambi”, or the recent “Open Season” and “Over the Hedge)” featured the equation animals=good/humans=bad but no movie for kids has gone so far in trying to induce guilt for membership in species homo sapiens.

3) There’s also a bizarre anti-religious bias operating unmistakably and gratuitously in the film. The penguin protagonist (known as “Mumbles Happy Feet”) finds himself harshly treated by the aged leaders of the flock, who worship a false God called “the Great Wind” and decry and persecute anyone who dares to challenge their “sacred” traditions. The voice of Robin Williams (in one of his two parts) also portrays a great religious guru and sage who turns out to be a complete phony, with no special knowledge of any kind. When intrepid penguins finally make contact with the “aliens” (otherwise known as humans) the first menacing structure they see is a church.

4) As in so many other recent films, there’s a subtext that appears to plead for endorsement of gay identity. Mumbles (the voice of Elijah Wood) displeases his parents and the leaders of his community because he’s born different, and makes an impassioned plea that he can’t possibly change – and they should accept him as he is.

Aside from all the politically correct messages, the movie remains singularly depressing, frustrating, scary and disturbing. An ardent love affair is frustrated for no apparent reason, with the main character’s inamorata choosing a crude, fat penguin she cares nothing about and producing many progeny. The movie’s conclusion – with tap=dancing penguins somehow persuading humankind to go to the U.N. (the United Nations Building even makes an appearance) to protect the Antarctic food chain-- makes no sense at either the emotional or plot-coherence level.

In short, “Happy Feet” comprises a strikingly downbeat evening (or afternoon) at the multiplex – an appalling waste of both time and money for patrons who will expect a far more cheerful, cold-climate-but-warm-hearted experience. The last time a major studio launched a comparably misleading ad campaign, they tried to sell Clint Eastwood’s “Million Dollar Baby” as a Rocky-in-sports-bra/noble underdog boxing movie--- deliberately hiding its intense assisted suicide theme. For “Happy Feet,” they seem to hide the movie’s darker, dysfunctional messages and to ignore its questionable elements for innocent kids.

With this posting, consider yourself warned: “Happy Feet” deserves designation as “Crappy Feet” and counts as one of the biggest disappointment of the onrushing holiday season.

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