Happy Feet Two (2011)

Happy Feet Two arrives with the mild, well-meaning cultural furniture of a 2011 animated sequel and very little else. The voice cast spreads a modest multiethnic net: Common as Seymour, Sofía Vergara as Carmen, a chorus of Adélie penguins speaking in thick Spanish accents, and a single Indian penguin who passes through without a line of consequence. This is texture, not argument. Race never becomes a subject. The women fare worse. Gloria and Carmen occupy the familiar posts of wife and love interest, and the emotional arc belongs to Mumble and his son. The film has no interest in disputing that arrangement.

The environmental instinct is present but soft. A colossal ice wall traps the colony, and the humans who once rescued Sven and Lovelace have lost their fishing grounds. The film gestures at ecological unease without ever stating a case. Sven, a puffin posing as a flying penguin, is a con artist, and the screenplay lets him be one without noticing that a con artist might invite some comment on credulity, wealth, or the arrangement of power. It does not. Erik's refusal to dance, his choreophobia, is handled as a lesson in individuality, nudging at difference and self-acceptance while keeping the language safely therapeutic.

The heaviest load is talk. Will the krill, an existentialist with ambitions above his station in the food chain, delivers musings on meaning and mortality that even Roger Ebert found excessive in the philosophy department. Here is a children's film where the smallest creatures carry the largest ideas and the dance numbers must compete with them. Nothing here revises history, since there is no history to revise, only Antarctica and its invented politics. The whole thing is a strange, overstuffed fable, a sequel that lost money and closed a studio, still humming with sincerity and unsure what it wanted to say.