Still hitting the spot

IN mainstream animated films for the youngsters, good old Uncle Walt Disney set the gold standard years ago with classics such as Bambi, The Jungle Book and 101 Dalmatians.
Even today, the formula changes little unless you happen to be Tim Burton making films about resurrected dogs – and that’s an entirely different story. No, the formula is usually a group of Good Guys (or animals), faced with peril, involving some Bad Guys (other animals, or sometimes humans), which then leads on to escapes, dancing, singing and celebration as they reach home safely.
Those filmgoers who have followed the Madagascar series closely through all its stages – 1 (get out of zoo, dumped in Madagascar with lemurs and chimps); 2 (flee Madagascar, but crash in Africa) and, finally, 3 (escape from Africa and land in Monaco), will recognise the landmarks.
Now, making a predictable movie is certainly a comfort to the film-maker who can say, fairly accurately, what it will make at the box office, and it may also be a comfort to the majority of family film-goers, who would prefer not to have any nasty surprises once they are settled into their seats. (Unlike one American audience recently who expected to see Madagascar 3, but actually got Paranormal Activity 4. Horror all round).
The Madagascar ‘cast’ is as before, with Alex the lion (Ben Stiller), Marty the zebra (Chris Rock), Gloria the hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith) and Melman the giraffe (David Schwimmer), plus of course King Julian (Sacha Baron Cohen) and the penguins.
The main characters find themselves abandoned in Africa by the scheming penguins, who have flown off in a chimp-powered plane to Monaco. Naturally, they have to be followed.
But they don’t reckon with the zealous animal officials of the EU, namely Captain Chantel DuBois (Frances McDormand), who has plans to stick Alex’s head on a wall, and the only escape is to join the circus.
The DreamwWorks artists have thrown many, many pots of computer ‘paint’ at the production, so much so that it resembles a hippy dream on occasions. However, as the audience on the day I went was a gaggle of young girls and their mums, this seemed entirely satisfactory.
Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted may not be a children’s cinema classic in the Bambi sense, but the franchise still seems to hit the spot for the under-10s.