Reply #115: They forgot: pro-international treaties, and pro-grassroots action! [View All]

[Lisa]

(spoilers)

Okay, I've seen the movie -- and all I can say is that Medved and Beck should lighten up. I suppose it's possible to label as "propaganda" any film aimed at children, which suggests these kinds of things ... in which case, I can think of dozens of other movies and TV shows that would end up in the same category:

1) Kids shouldn't ostracize classmates who don't excel at a particular skill -- they might turn out to be really great at something else. Likewise, teachers (and the entire educational system) should try to think about developing talents in a range of areas, and not be singleminded about just one thing (in the penguins' case, trying to find a mate).

2) It's good to make friends with people from different cultures, instead of shunning them. By the way, I agree with the earlier poster who mentioned the pro-immigration angle. That seems to be more prominent than homosexuality -- the main characters appear to be heterosexual. Personally I don't consider "dancing" to be a homosexual characteristic, though I suppose in our culture some people might have developed this perspective. I think that the filmmakers were looking beyond that, and having fun with the Calvinist prohibition on dancing (very strict Presbyterians used to forbid it) -- perhaps that's why the elderly leader of the Emperors has a Scottish accent?

3) Overly-dogmatic leaders who single out particular groups based on moral judgements, and make them scapegoats, should be questioned. One of the penguins catches the leader in a logical error, and immediately pounces on it ("if the aliens don't exist, why are you worried about them coming here?").

4) Ordinary people, especially children, can have a tremendous influence on public policy by pressuring their leaders to make laws -- like international environmental treaties. The film shows massive public protests, and policymakers, at national levels and ultimately at the UN, coming to an agreement to save the penguins' food supply ... and by the end, it appears to be successful.

5) Scientists are trying to tell us how to save the environment, and we should listen to their findings. I didn't see much on global warming, unless you count the part where the long-abandoned machine falls out of the ice sheet -- and the characters don't mention climate change at all. Which kind of deep-sixes Beck's assumption that it's "an animated version of An Inconvenient Truth" -- rather, trash, and overfishing by large factory boats, are the main focus. There's actually a lot of scientific evidence to suggest that humans ARE harvesting a large proportion of biomass in the oceans. I suppose that the industrialists will criticize any attempts to create marine protected areas of the type shown at the end of the film, arguing that the fish and crustaceans will otherwise "go to waste", but fishing communities support conservation of stocks because it will guarantee them jobs into the future.


p.s. note to parents -- there are a couple of potentially-scary scenes involving predators (skuas, leopard seals, and killer whales) which very young kids might find disturbing. So if your child might not like seeing a large seal jumping out of the screen -- might be best to wait until s/he is a bit older. (I'm going to suggest this to my co-worker, whose daughter is 3, and was freaked out by seeing the sharks "with the big teeth", and the fish-purloining diver in "Finding Nemo" on DVD last year.)