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Features
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Tapping Out a Happy Rhythm
Many moons after stumbling through tap dance lessons with the wife of his Road Warrior cinematographer, Australian filmmaker George Miller wisely chose to defer to the world’s best.
Monday, March 26, 2007 at 3:15 PM
By Pam Grady
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Lester Cohen/WireImage.com
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Wearing his lucky jacket
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George Miller is dressed for the kitchen. He is in a hotel conference room and there is not a pot, pan or whisk in sight, nor anything to cook on. Yet here he is, wearing a black chef's coat with red chili peppers dotting the front. But then maybe the outfit is symbolic – or at least those chilies are. After all, his forays into family fare - Babe, Babe: Pig in the City and this week's new DVD Happy Feet - were all hot, hot, hot at the box office.
For Miller's first film in nearly a decade, he turned to CGI with a tale of a little Emperor penguin named Mumble who is ostracized by his colony, because unlike the other penguins, he cannot sing. Instead, he tap dances up a storm. The voice of the oddly blue-eyed bird who never quite loses his baby fluff as he grows into adulthood is Elijah Wood's, but the moves – made possible by motion capture – belong to peerless dancer Savion Glover.
"Andrew Lesnie, who shot the Babe films also shot Lord of the Rings, and I saw the early Gollum and what they were doing with animation and motion capture, and I thought, 'Oh, we can make the penguins dance,'" Miller reveals during his chat with FilmStew.
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Jemal Countess/WireImage.com
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Savion Glover, doing his thing
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If it were not for the sheer length of time that animated features take to produce, Miller might be accused of being a bandwagon jumper, Happy Feet coming as it is slightly more than a year after the Oscar-winning March of the Penguins and Madagascar with its sarcastic, escape-obsessed zoo penguins. But Miller is only the latest artist to be taken by the birds, which have rubbed up against everyone from Wallace and Gromit to Batman.
In Miller's case, the spark was Life in the Freezer, a six-part BBC documentary series written by David Attenborough and directed by Alastair Fothergill. When he first saw this natural history of the Emperor penguin a decade or so ago, he was astounded.
"I was amazed that these creatures, half the size of human beings, lived by community in this very immense and harsh landscape – very beautiful, but very tough landscape," he marvels. "And they did it by sharing the warmth, by basically sharing energy. When I knew that they sang to each other to find a mate, I was really blown away by that."
The more he thought about, the more Miller realized that there was a story that he could tell. He was particularly taken by the birds' "heartsong," the call they use to find a mate. "Because they sang, a penguin comes along who can't sing and he goes to a remedial teacher who says, 'Bring out your deepest emotions,' and it turns out to be tap dancing. Suddenly, I was making Happy Feet!" he exclaims.
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Lester Cohen/WireImage.com
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Co-stars Williams, Wood, Murphy
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But a tap-dancing penguin? Is that really the most natural image, given how awkward the Emperors look as they waddle along? "They walk upright and they've already got tuxedos," protests Miller, adding, "Their knees are inside their bodies, so obviously they're buffered against the cold."
There is a little more to it than that. As it turns out, when the 61-year-old Australian was in his 30s, Annie Semler, a dancer and wife of Road Warrior cinematographer Dean Semler, decided to teach some of her friends, Miller among them, how to tap dance. "I was shocking at it," laughs Miller. "[But] I just loved it."
Once he knew that he was going to employ motion capture and that the movie would, in fact, feature entire production numbers of dancing penguins, it was time to hire dancers. He had a wonderful talent pool to choose from in Australia, but when it came to a dancer to provide Mumble's movements, he went straight to the top.
"I thought, 'Who is the greatest tap dancer in the world? Savion Glover,'" explains Miller. "He's the last. Since the death of Gregory Hines, he carries the mantle of all those great hoofers way back from when tap dancing [began]. He keeps the flame.”
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Jessie Grant/WireImage.com
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Man of many talents Jackman
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“I went to Seattle and he was dancing there and I showed him the first test, a crude test of the little tap dancing penguin,” he continues. “He said, 'I'm in. If this takes tap dancing do a broader audience, I'll be very happy.' He sees himself as a teacher – if he's not dancing, he's teaching kids. I think he's very keen on this film."
Just as important as the dancing to Miller was finding the right voices for the film. There are three species of penguin in the film - the Emperor, the Adelie and the Rockhopper, with each voice roughly coinciding to a multiplicity of human ethnicities. "One of the big issues is that the penguins are metaphorical for humankind,” suggests Miller. “We were following at the same time, the natural history of penguins."
"The Emperor penguins all look the same, so we needed distinctive voices and we needed distinctive accents," he continues. "When we had Dr. Gary Miller – they call him Dr. Penguin, he's the expert on penguins in the world – he said the Emperors are named that because they're stately. The Adelies are much more rambunctious and that sort of reminded me when you look at the footage of, you know, Copacabana Beach. It was all Latin.”
“I wanted to use Latin music and so we really, really tried to make that the case. Lovelace, the Rockhopper penguin, he was like a Barry White character. But they all had to be distinctly different one from the other, because basically they have the same costume."
The range of voices is reflected in the vocal talent Miller gathered. Robin Williams is on hand to lend his vocal mimicry to both Lovelace and Ramon, a sassy Adelie who befriends Mumble; Brittany Murphy is Mumble's love interest Gloria, the penguin with the biggest voice in the colony; Hugo Weaving is Noah the suspicious elder who instigates Mumble's ostracism. Nicole Kidman is the breathy-voiced Norma Jean, Mumble's mother; and Hugh Jackman is Mumble's dad, the Elvis-like Memphis. Miller was happy to give Jackman - a performer prized in the theater for his pipes who has not gotten the call so far in movie musicals - the opportunity to stretch his vocal chords.
"I hadn't seen in The Boy from Oz, but I'd seen him in Oklahoma and I knew he could sing," Miller says.
Eighteen months ago, Warner Bros. President Alan Horn called Miller to let him know that the Warner Independent arm had picked up March of the Penguins for distribution. "[Alan] was already aware about penguins through what we were doing," Miller explains. As far as Miller is concerned, it is all good and the fact March of the Penguins was such a huge hit augurs well for Happy Feet. "It was great when it was a big success, because it certainly lifted awareness of our film," he says
| By all indications, Miller was right. Happy Feet grossed just under $200 million domestically, waddling its way to the number two spot on the list of 2006 PG-rated films behind Night at the Museum. The DVD Extras include a Deleted Scene featuring the late Steve Irwin as the voice of an albatross and "Dance Like a Penguin," a five-minute lesson from Savion Glover designed to help kids tap it out like Mumbles. | |
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