Madagascar and Nemo

Having seen Madagascar yesterday with my son, I was struck by a few things throughout the film, especially in regards to its relationship with Finding Nemo, the films immediate predecessor. So, here are some notes about the two.

First, Madagascar is an inferior film. Nemo had a much more engaging story, more original characters, and, as a result of its setting, felt fresher - jungle animal films are somewhat played out. Another way that its inferiority was marked for me was through the targeted audience of the film. I remember having numerous discussions regarding Nemo with colleagues and students. One of the things that kept coming up was how Nemo was able to engage adult and child audiences. Madagascar and many other films try to do this as well, but fail in that they approach the audiences in a radically different way. Nemo engaged both audiences through the story. It is about both a child and an adult dealing with loss and tragedy; a compelling story in the immediate post 9/11 world. The trials of both bring in the audiences and give them a character to attach to.

Madagascar, however, seeks to engage audiences through dialogue and reference. While the story is ostensibly directed at children, it is about zoo animals and has dancing, singing, and a share of "foul" language, the dialogue and cinematics go for the adults. I was struck by this early in the film when the lion character describes the penguins as "psychotic." The language felt too old for the audience - use crazy and kids will get it, use psychotic and many lose the moment. Beyond this minor moment though, the film was littered with references to other films that children really will not get. A reference to The Planet of the Apes was the most obvious but also the one that fell, to my mind, the most flat as they had to "clean it up" for kids. This marks the feeling I had throughout the film of the filmakers wanting to make references and jokes, but at the expense of what else was happening in the film.

The more interesting comparison for me between the two films, though, is the question of eating other animals. The brief moments in Nemo with Bruce are wonderful for their playfulness in remaking the top predator of the undersea world into a recovering addict. It fits well with the overall theme of the film and the other characters who are working to overcome flaws like a little fin or deepseated fears.

Madagascar does something similar with Alex the lion. He has been raised in the zoo eating steaks, and when they find themselves in Madagascar he has to deal with his role as a top predator and desire to eat his best friend Marty the zebra. In this film, though, this becomes a much bigger issue taking up much of the last part of the film. Somehow, Alex overcomes his desires and rescues his friends; then he is seen to become a sushi loving lion. For Alex, fish are food.

This character trait throws into relief some things about Bruce that are left unanswered and bring up some larger questions. At the end of Nemo, Bruce is friends with Nemo and his father, but it is not clear what he will now eat. What does he put in place of fish for his food?

More interestingly, though, the two bring up the issue of how the films are refiguring this position of the top predator into one that is unthreatening or at least more palatable. It is at once a recognition of the dangerousness that lurks behind these characters and their need to be recuperated for children to enjoy. (I am reminded of watching an animal show about lions recently with my son and how he was shocked to see a group of lions take down and eat, quite graphically, a baby elephant. It didn't traumatize him, but it certainly changed his understanding of lions.)

Some on the web, I will not link, have complained that this is an example of some sort of pollyannaishness - making predators into nice animals. But I think that is too simple as we have long done that without recognizing the things that predators do - especially for lions. I wonder, though, what more is going on here. Again, Nemo seems to make the questions more interesting as there are more obvious issues of gender running though there, but Madagascar makes that as well. Overlaid on that in Madagascar is also the question of race. Alex is white while Marty is black. I would want to think more about this, but I wonder if both films are working with reconfiguring dominant masculinity is a way that makes it less threatening to others, but without really taking way the threat.