The Pebble and the Penguin (1995) on Netflix
G19951h 14mAdventureAnimationComedy
Hubie, a shy Adélie penguin in Antarctica, loves Marina, the rookery's most beautiful penguin. Custom requires a pebble at the full moon ceremony, and rival Drake wants her too.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb5.6/106,149 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes31%
Trailer
Plot summary
Among the Adélie penguins of Antarctica, the mating season brings the males to the beaches to search for pebbles, and at the full moon ceremony each offers one to the female he hopes to take as a mate. Hubie is shy and kind, and he has set his heart on Marina, the rookery's most beautiful penguin. Drake, a strong and mean-spirited rival, wants her as well. Without a pebble of his own, Hubie wishes on a star and an emerald cube drops from the sky. Drake corners him and demands the stone; when Hubie refuses, Drake throws him into the sea. Hubie escapes a leopard seal and drifts off on the ice. Three days later, humans haul him aboard a ship bound for a zoo, where he meets Rocko, a feisty rockhopper penguin.
Cast
- Alissa Kingas Petra (voice)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Pebble and the Penguin (1995)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Late in production MGM demanded characters be dropped, sequences trimmed and voices re-recorded. The effects work fell so far behind that a Hungarian studio, Reflex Animation Ltd, had to take on extra coloring, and Don Bluth and Gary Goldman walked out and asked to be uncredited as directors.
- Because the penguins wear clothes, the animators could not simply copy real birds: people were put into penguin costumes and filmed, and that footage became photostat reference for the drawings.
- It is the last feature Don Bluth made with traditional hand-painted cels. His next film, Anastasia, switched to digital coloring of scanned drawings, retiring the cels, the multiplane camera and the optical effects used here for the final time.
- It was the last picture Don Bluth Ireland Limited ever produced; the studio went bankrupt and shut down afterwards.
- When the Hong Kong company Media Assets took over his Irish studio, Bluth said the story and film were already compromised and told his crew "I can't chew with someone else's mouth". He and Goldman removed their names and took Bill Mechanic's offer to build a new animation studio in America.
