Penguins of Madagascar (2014)

Penguins of Madagascar arrives in 2014 as a spin-off of a franchise that had already produced three features, and it carries the confidence of a property that knows its audience. Four Adélie penguins, a disgruntled octopus disguised as a human scientist, and an inter-species intelligence agency called the North Wind collide in a caper that moves through Venice, Shanghai, and New York with the urgency of a film afraid to sit still. The plot concerns a snow globe collection and a serum that turns penguins into monsters. That is the whole of it. John Malkovich voices the octopus with evident relish, and Benedict Cumberbatch supplies a wolf whose name is classified, which is the film's best joke, and the film knows it.

The picture is almost aggressively indifferent to the cultural concerns that occupy more serious animated work. Its voice cast is drawn from the usual pool, with Ken Jeong and Annet Mahendru filling supporting slots, though the characters are anthropomorphic animals and the film never pauses to remark on who is speaking. A snowy owl named Eva works as an intelligence analyst and functions as Kowalski's love interest, and the screenplay asks nothing further of her. Rico's appetite for explosives is a running gag, not a portrait. The villain's grievance is vanity, the sting of being upstaged at zoos, which keeps the whole affair free of class resentment and structural complaint.

Here is a film that preaches nothing, and there is a strange integrity in that. It wants to be loud, brief, and amusing, and it succeeds often enough to justify its ninety-two minutes. The lesson, such as it is, involves Private learning that he matters to the team, a moral so generic it could be stenciled onto any children's property from the past forty years. DreamWorks lost money on it. The studio has survived worse.