The cuteness of penguins arrived on the world stage in 2005, when Morgan Freeman voiced the documentary “March of the Penguins.” A year later, we had cute tap-dancing penguins in “Happy Feet.” (Penguins had become hot). Then, the “Madagascar” cartoon series needed to have some penguins too.
Those penguins stole scenes from the lion-zebra-hippo-giraffe quartet, so now there’s the inevitable spinoff of minor players getting their own spotlight, and we have “Penguins of Madagascar.” An origins story.
Penguins are still hot. Hollywood is milking penguin cuteness for all its worth.
So we’re in Antarctica! Look! Long lines of penguins! Doing that marching thing that we know about from “March of the Penguins.”
Oh, wait, a documentary is even being filmed! This is good; they got legendary director Werner Herzog to lend “authenticity” (and silliness) in the form of his heavy German accent, voicing a pretend documentary filmmaker. It’s a similar kind of funny as when “Saturday Night Live” had Jesse Jackson read “Green Eggs and Ham” onstage, wearing a suit.
Speaking of eggs, some penguin’s egg goes on the lam, rolling down snowy bluffs and careening off icebergs. The juvenile penguin trio of Skipper (voiced by Tom McGrath), Kowalski (Chris Miller), and Rico (Conrad Vernon) do a sort of Three Musketeers “All-for-one-and-one-for-all” type mission-statement (something about fearlessness) and go rescue that egg from leopard seals and such.
The egg hatches into a sort of d'Artagnan fourth member, Private (Christopher Knights).
