These images were fed into computers at the digital effects house, Animal Logic in Sydney. An expedition led by Antarctic tour guide Howard Whelan spent two months in Antarctica photographing landscapes and icebergs and fauna from every conceivable angle. At the same time, Miller wanted the film to be ‘photorealistic’, reasoning that the beauty of the Antarctic landscapes did not need augmentation so much as accurate rendition. These techniques made it possible to conceive of Happy Feet as a musical, where the moves of some of the greatest dancers in the world – notably tapper Savion Glover – could be digitally captured and rendered onto the penguins. He was also impressed by the advances in digital motion capture technology developed by Peter Jackson’s company Weta Digital, for the Lord of the Rings films. Miller was amazed and moved by the story of how the Emperor penguins breed, which he saw in David Attenborough’s BBC series Life in the Freezer, made in 1993. There were a number of direct inspirations for the film. Miller sees the growth in digital effects as the greatest change in film technology since the coming of sound and Happy Feet set out to take that technology further than any film had done before. All of the film, except for a few shots of humans, was generated in computers. There are obvious similarities in the overall shape of the story – a pig that wants to herd sheep, a penguin that wants to dance – but Happy Feet leaps much more wholeheartedly into the digital possibilities of computer animation. Happy Feet is much more than an extension of the winning formula that George Miller discovered with Babe. Mumble will see many amazing things before he returns to his home. A fat Rockhopper penguin called Lovelace (also voiced by Robin Williams), who’s slowly being strangled by a plastic tie around his neck, joins their quest. He is adopted by five fun-loving Argentinian Adelie penguins, led by the pint-sized Ramon (voiced by Robin Williams), who teach him how to party. He has heard a rumour from the large and frightening Boss Skua (voiced by Anthony LaPaglia) that aliens inhabit the earth. His mother Norma Jean (voiced by Nicole Kidman) is heartbroken.Ī dejected Mumble leaves the colony, determined to find out why the fish are disappearing. Worse, Mumble (voiced by Elijah Wood) is banished by the elders, who think his dancing is responsible for their shortage of fish. He knows he can dance better than any penguin alive, but as his father Memphis (voiced by Hugh Jackman) tells him, dancing ‘just ain’t penguin’. His friend Gloria (voiced by Brittany Murphy) has a glorious voice, but Mumble can never hope to attract a mate without a ‘heart song’, the personal tune that all Emperor penguins must have. Mumble is the only Emperor penguin chick in Antarctica who can’t sing. Digital animation has changed that, because it can replicate multiple characters more easily – hence, the possibility of a phalanx of 50 tapping penguins, in a colony of 500,000! Happy Feet Synopsis The more characters in a scene, the more work. Musical animation had always been a form in which the number of figures was usually kept to a minimum, because each figure in a traditional cell animation was hand-drawn. One of George Miller’s more inspired ideas is to see the story as a live action musical and to use many of the techniques of the modern large-scale dance film. The idea of a ‘heart song’ comes from the fact that Emperor penguins do use vocalisations to attract a mate, although tap dancing is not actually part of the ritual.
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