MADAGASCAR
Directors: Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath
Starring: Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, Jada Pinkett Smith, David Schwimmer, Cedric the Entertainer, Ali G
Genre: Animation
2005

Reviewed by Vance Aandahl
Watson Scale rating (0 being worst and 6 being perfect): 2.5

Near the end of his savage, brilliant life, William Burroughs wrote “Ghost of a Chance,” a novella first published in 1991 in a limited edition by the Library Fellows of the Whitney Museum of American Art, then released for the masses by High Risk Books in 1995. In the first few pages of “Ghost of a Chance,” Captain Mission arms himself with a double-barreled flintlock and a pouch of indri, a highly potent native psychedelic consisting of greenish-yellow crystals, then plunges into the wilderness of Madagascar in search of the world's oldest primates, the lemurs. The native word for lemur means ghost, and Captain Mission finds his own personal ghost, a deer lemur, in the ruins of a stone temple overgrown with moss and creepers. “The ears were large, flaring forward, the eyes limpid amber, in which the pupil floated like a glittering jewel, changing color with shifts of the light:  obsidian, emerald, ruby, opal, amethyst, diamond.” The lemur approaches Captain Mission. “Slowly the animal raised one paw and touched his face, stirring memories of the ancient betrayal. Tears streaming down his face, he stroked the animal's head.”

They lie there together in the ruins, Captain Mission with his arm around the lemur, the lemur snuggling close and touching Captain Mission's face with a paw. “Tiny mouse lemurs stole out of the roots and niches and holes in the ancient tree and frisked around the room, falling on insects with little squeals. Their tails twitched above their heads; their great flaring ears, thin as paper, quivered to every sound as their wide, limpid eyes swept the walls and floors for insects. They had been doing this for millions of years. The twitching tail, the trembling ears mark the passage of centuries.”

Later in “Ghost of a Chance,” Burroughs tells us that, “Lemur People are older than Homo Sap, much older. They date back one hundred sixty million years, to the time when Madagascar split off from the mainland of Africa. Their way of thinking and feeling is basically different from ours, not oriented toward time and sequence and causality. They find these concepts repugnant and difficult to understand.”

I read “Ghost of a Chance” a couple of years ago, and ever since, whenever I hear the word “lemur,” my brainpan is suffused with intimations of ancient beauty, ancient wisdom, and ancient sorrow. When someone told me that the latest animated feature from DreamWorks has lemurs in it, I couldn’t resist temptation. Hurriedly I assembled a party of three – Moxie, age 4, Little Deuteronomy, age 12, and myself, an ageless 62 – and with no further ado we boarded the #65 bus and were on our way to the sumptuous, palatial, and (best of all!) air-conditioned inner sanctum of the Continental 6 to catch the mid-morning matinee of MADAGASCAR.

To my horror and dismay, I discovered that the lemurs in MADAGASCAR are a tribe of nutsy, wacked-out jitterbugs. They bear no discernible relationship to Burroughs’ gentle, solitary ghosts, more closely resembling Ewoks on ecstasy. Packed tightly together in their jungle clearing, they dance all day in a euphoric, loose-limbed festival of color and rhythm, hopping up and down and leaping about with a wild, riotous abandonment that’s reminiscent of the palm-wine harvest celebration in a West African village, or a Brazilian carnaval parade, or now that I think about it, one of those all-night raves that young Americans enjoyed in the 1980’s and 1990’s. With his advisor Maurice (Cedric the Entertainer) by his side, the lemurs’ madcap King Julien (Sacha Baron Cohen, aka Ali G) presides over the party by calling out an antic, non-stop, free-associative rap punctuated with occasional cries of “Move it! Move it!” to inspire the dancers.

If I weren’t such a sourpuss, so fixed in my ways, so rigid in my expectations, I would have been delighted by MADAGASCAR’s lively depiction of the Lemur People. But nobody’s likely to be delighted by the movie’s main characters, four escapees from Central Park Zoo, Alex the lion (Ben Stiller), Marty the zebra (Chris Rock), Melman the giraffe (David Schwimmer), and Gloria the hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith). Needless to say, they do a good job of exchanging wisecracks throughout the movie, but the problem is that each of the four is characterized by one trait and one trait only, and that’s just not enough to create empathy and identification in a viewer. Alex’s trait is superstar egocentricity, Marty’s is wanderlust, Melman’s is hypochondria, and Gloria’s is...is...well, I don’t know...maybe poor Gloria has no trait at all.

I’m being a bit unfair here. Alex’s characterization takes on an added layer – a complication, if you will – near the end of the film. All his life, the zookeepers have fed him steaks, but now that he’s lost in the jungles of Madagascar, Alex must survive on his own. When he gets hungry, his predatory instincts awaken for the very first time, and he struggles with himself. Should he eat the lemurs? Should he eat Marty and Melman and Gloria? Or should he use his newborn carnivorous ferocity to protect both the lemurs and his friends from the nasty little native predators known as foosas? This inner conflict would be much more gripping if it had been foreshadowed ominously during the first half of the film. As it is, the conflict feels tacked on, like an afterthought. Disney explored the same dramatic premise much more successfully nearly 60 years ago in the character of Lambert, the sheepish lion.

The foosas in MADAGASCAR are snarly cowards. Rather than launching a direct attack, they skulk about, threatening to sneak up on our heroes and dog-pile them like a pack of jackals. At no time did I find these cartoon foosas truly frightening. In this regard the moviemakers have missed a bet, for my guru and master J-Rod tells me, “I've looked into the pitch-black eyes of a foosa, and I’ve never seen a more forbidding and horrific sight.”  Yikes!

The only characters that actually amused me are four tough-guy penguins. Part Brooklyn mobster, part ninja assassin, part Navy SEAL, their leader Skipper (Tom McGrath) propels the plot forward with quick-waddling energy while Alex and his pals get tossed this way and that by the vicissitudes of fortune. The visual effects in MADAGASCAR also deserve praise. The animators have rendered the animal characters in a simple cartoonish fashion, while the backgrounds are slightly stylized but generally much more realistic. The first half of the story takes place in several well-known actual locations (Central Park Zoo, Grand Central Station, and the inside of a subway car), and the animators have depicted them with a careful attention to detail. But the music – if there was any – left no impression on me.