Trailer
Plot summary
Mumble hatches into a colony of emperor penguins where a heartsong wins a mate, and he has no singing voice. His father, Memphis, briefly dropped the egg while he cared for it through the winter, and his mother, Norma Jean, finds the chick's habit of tapping his feet cute. Memphis says it is not penguin. Gloria, his friend from the moment they hatched, is the finest singer of their age, and Mumble is enamored with her. Tap dancing is something no penguin in the colony has seen, and the elders, led by Noah the Elder, treat Mumble as too different.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Happy Feet (2006)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The tap dancing of the penguin Mumble was performed by Savion Glover through motion capture, and he co-choreographed the dance sequences as well. The human dancers attended a "Penguin School" to learn penguin movement and wore head gear that imitated a beak.
- Animal Logic built a server farm with IBM to render the film, using BladeCenter HS20 blade servers that each carried two Intel Xeon processors. The rendering alone consumed 17 million CPU hours across nine months.
- Prince was given a private screening only so the producers could get his blessing for using "Kiss" in a musical number. He liked the film, approved the song, offered to write an original one, and delivered "Song of the Heart" a week later; it won the Golden Globe for Best Original Song.
- A scene in which Mumble meets a blue whale and an albatross was cut from the film. The albatross had been Steve Irwin's first voice role, before he instead voiced the elephant seal in the final cut, and the sequence was finished and put on the DVD in Irwin's memory.
- George Miller traced the idea back to a conversation with cinematographer Bill Grimmond on the set of The Road Warrior. Grimmond, who had shot a documentary in Antarctica, told Miller he should set a film there, comparing the ice to the desert wasteland they were shooting in.
- Happy Feet was the very first winner of the BAFTA Award for Best Animated Film, taking the category in its inaugural year, and it also won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
