A brief disclaimer: the author acknowledges that some of the views expressed in this review are potentially somewhat politically incorrect. The author does not necessarily agree with all of the opions expressed, it is merely an attempt at pin pointing what the director was really getting at behind the mask of cute animals.
Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa by Ben Herr
Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, displays a new approach at educating kids in today’s issues. It combines great digital animation and catchy humor to spice up an illustration of the situation our country is in.
The beginning of the movie was especially spot on as it depicted the main characters being launched in a plane that is just one more drop of bad luck away from crashing. One can’t help but see how this scene is mirrored by the declining state of our economy. We have built our nation in such a way that it balances on the ever weakening thread of economics. We walked blindly into such a fragile situation, so wholly immersed in soaking up admiration from neighboring countries and friends that we failed to see the disaster waiting to happen.
It is also important to note that the quartet of penguins controlling the plane have an astoundingly small knowledge of their craft and simply make decisions as situations arise, a style that may look good at first, but is flirting with, and eventually will collide with, utter catastrophe.
These four lovable flightless birds draw up a striking simile to those sitting in pretty little offices in New York (another location eluded to many times in the film as being a place a little…shall we say, atypical?) controlling our countries economy by tapping away at their cute little lap top’s.
As the plane takes off out of a giant tree, it immediately spins in a hopeless spiral down, and out of sight behind branches. All hope is lost. The feeling of, “Well it serves them right for going about their job so recklessly” is a quite natural reaction. Then, without any explanation whatsoever, it suddenly emerges from the branches, flying in tip top shape. Can anyone say, “Mega million dollars buy out?” A very controversial issue, many hard workers across the lower forty-eight, as well as Hawaii and Alaska, had to wonder, “We do our jobs better than anyone else, we put countless drops of sweat into our five figure salaries, and when they completely botch their job, a hand comes out of no where to pull them out of their tail spin and land millions of dollars in their lap.
The story progresses as Alex the Lion meets up with his dad; the alpha lion of the herd, and after a few minor events, Alex is given the task of completing a sort of initiation trial. Alex is a bit uninformed of the procedure, thinking it is a sort of dance off, when it is, in reality, a fight. After it goes horribly for Alex, there is a conversation between him and his dad in which Alex angrily says, “You could have told me!”
It is at this point that one realizes the director is making a daring comparison to the Bush clan. Looking back at George W. Bush’s early debates, it is quite easy to wonder if he really knew what he was there for. We have to wonder whether there was a brief confrontation between W. and Sr. in which W. said, “Why didn’t you tell me it was a debate! I thought we were just going to go out there, give our scripted answers and look pretty!”
Without going into the details (and therefore spoiling the movie), it is quite clear that the director is making a bold prediction. When a new alpha lion takes over the herd and everything goes wrong, Alex and his father join together and save the herd from certain doom. This is obviously implying that when our countries new president realizes he lacks the experience and know how, and things start going poorly, George W. and George Sr. will team up and split Sr.’s four years of eligibility for base a two year incumbency that will save the nation from all of it’s problems (all, that is, except for the economy which the people who wrecked it are still trying to fix, relying heavily on foreign labor to get things up and running, which will eventually lead to some major miscommunication and another almost catastrophe).
While these are the main points the director was trying to make, there are some other underlying parallels drawn. An old peppy lady with a nasty left hook leads a group of lost and confused tourists in an attempt to over throw the lions and the established way of life. She obtains followers by a combination of two methods: 1) appearing to look like she knows what she is doing (though she admits that it is not so) and doing it with a smile on her face, and 2) by finding followers so hopeless and confused that they blindly obey her every command. The old lady puts up a nasty fight and almost comes out on top, but in the end is left down, but not out.
In this way, the director points at how Hillary Clinton obtained countless supporters who were so unhappy and hopeless due to the current regime that they blindly became followers due to the fact that she was a woman and has some charisma. Just like the movie, she is currently down, but not out.
The film is stashed with tons of other illustrations, but to save some time and just name a few, some of the most obvious are:
1) The scene where Alex’s mother turns out the light by squishing the lightning bug shows how the people in high places love to use the little people for their own benefit, but once they are no longer of use to them, they will squish them and move on to new servants.
2) The giraffe is told that he is going to die in a few days, so he begins to make a series of rash decisions that almost get him killed, based on the assumption that he is going to die anyway. This is strikingly similar to the predicament that Harold Kamping, the horrifically off base radio evangelist, has put many of his followers in by predicting that Christ will return in 2011.
3) And lastly, the director offers our country’s leaders a piece of advice for foreign affairs. Alex and his father get caught in the middle of a camp of angry humans who want to eat them for supper. Alex’s father tries to intimidating them with his power and his roar. But it doesn’t work. Alex then saves the two of them by putting on an impressive dance show that wows the audience. This is a plea to the USA government to stop trying to maintain foreign relations by flexing our powerful military. It needs to get down on a personal level and do things that actually impress people, not frighten them. Things like dumping a couple million dollars in order to provide villages with clean water instead of adding another fighter jet to the air force.
All in all, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa shows some deep insight into our current political situation and brings it down to level even kids will understand and enjoy. This movie is the pinnacle of where politics meets family entertainment.
