Trivia / Happy Feet

• Acting for Two: Robin Williams as Lovelace, Ramón, and Cletus, in a rare example of it being pretty obvious.
• All-Star Cast: Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, Hugo Weaving, Brittany Murphy, Elijah Wood, Robin Williams, Anthony LaPaglia, Miriam Margoyles, Fat Joe and Steve Irwin.
• Awesome, Dear Boy: Prince originally denied the filmmakers permission to use "Kiss," but then decided he wanted to see the movie first before he made a firm decision. Not only did he love the movie and ultimately gave them permission, but he wrote a new song especially for its soundtrack in just one week. That song, "The Song of the Heart", won him a Golden Globe.
• Dueling Movies: With Surf's Up. Happy Feet was the clear winner financially, but both went over well with critics.
• Executive Meddling: The movie originally involved a subplot regarding actual extraterrestrial aliens, whose presence was made gradually more and more known throughout, and who were planning to siphon off the planet's resources gradually, placing the humans in the same light as the penguins. At the end, through the plight of the main character, their hand is stayed, and instead, first contact is made. This was chopped out during the last year of production at the behest of the studio executives, and has yet to see the light of day in a finished form, although concept art is available, and certain shots from these sequences do remain in the film, those of space being the most prominent, having become instead a constant visual motif. The film would've been somewhat longer, by extension. This also explains the bizarre closing credits, in which the names of the cast and crew were displayed over various planets and stars, and the opening, which zooms in on Earth from outside the galaxy.
• Fake American: Anthony LaPaglia puts on a New York accent as the mafia-type Skua Boss, while Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman put on Southern accents as Memphis and Norma Jean.
• In Memoriam: Of Steve Irwin, who voiced the elephant seals and, in a deleted scene, an albatross. The film is also dedicated to Nick Enright, Michael Jonson, and Robby McNeilly Green.
• Irony as She Is Cast: Unlike Mumble, Elijah Wood is actually a pretty decent singer — as is E.G. Daily, the voice of young Mumble, who is a professional singer.
• Kids' Meal Toy: Burger King had a Kids' Meal tie-in with this film. These were a series of figures hidden inside plastic eggs. These consisted of Heart of Norma Jean, Dancing Lovelace, Huggable Mumble, Feet Stompin' Renaldo, Melody Ramon, Mumble Grows Up, Heartsong Gloria, Glide Lombardo, Memphis and Mumble, Waddle Raul, Nestor Slide, and Tapping Mumble.
• Life Imitates Art: In 2011, an emperor penguin was found on a Peka Peka beach, on New Zealand northwest coast. The public was quick to dub the lost bird "Happy Feet Jr." Like his namesake, the bird was taken in by Wellington Zoo, rehabilitated, and released back into the wild affixed with a satellite tracking device.
• No Export for You: None of the video games were released in Japan.
• One-Book Author: Compared to Animal Logic (the animation studio behind the film) and Kennedy-Miller Productions, this is the only known production of Kingdom Feature Productions.
• The Other Darrin: In the movie tie-in game, both of Robin Williams' roles as Lovelace and Ramón were inherited by Fred Tatasciore and Dan Castellaneta respectively. Coincidentally, Castellaneta also replaced Williams as the Genie in Aladdin: The Series.
• Production Posse:
  • E.G. Daily previously worked with Miller on both Lorenzo's Oil and Babe: Pig in the City.
  • Miriam Margolyes also worked with Miller before on the first Babe movie.
• Talent Double: Sort of. While most of the character animation is done from scratch, the dancing is all motion captured from the best tap dancer in the world at the time, Savion Glover.
• What Could Have Been:
  • An early cut of the film involved a subplot regarding actual extraterrestrial aliens near the end, whose presence was made gradually more and more known throughout. The aliens were planning to siphon off the planet's resources gradually, placing the humans in the same plight as the penguins. At the end, thanks to Mumbles, their hand is stayed, and instead first contact is made. This was chopped out during the last year of production, and has yet to see the light of day in a finished form. There is proof in the form of concept art, and this dropped plot helps explain the outer space motif that remains in the film and the aliens would resemble giant penguins.
  • This is further confirmed by the release of an early, undated draft of the screenplay, which includes the above-mentioned ending, as well as an even darker tone - confirming that, among other things, the film was originally and unequivocally aimed at a much narrower age-bracket, rather than the all-embracing tone of the finished film. You can find it here.
    • The film is aided by a narration from the main character Mumble throughout, instead of Robin Williams as Lovelace. As such, while the finished film's narration aided the mythic narrative in classic "Road Warrior/Beyond Thunderdome" style by lionizing Mumble after the fact and tying into the climactic moment when he leaps off the iceberg to follow the ships, this one is a lot more personal, and that's reflected in it when it allows us to gain fuller insight into penguin society, religion and things like that which we don't get in the finished film.
    • The characters all curse like sailors. The entire thing has a much more Ocker, Australian feel. The original script was never really intended to be primarily a children's film, but it's obvious from this that it was originally meant to appeal to a more narrow age-group than the finished movie, which sits somewhere between Watership Down and Golden Age Disney. This one falls distinctly to the left on that spectrum.
    • The famine subplot is more greatly expanded upon in the film's opening sequences, and in every scene after, where it becomes the defining event that we're told is killing off the penguin wives after their return from the hunt in large numbers. As the film progresses, the colony becomes tinier and more sparse, until by the end it's a shadow of its former self. There's also a scene early on where, after Mumble wonders off on his own to dance, he doesn't end up on the huge ice mountain looking over the colony, but instead into a weird, far out section of the colony which is populated by starving penguin fathers going insane from lack of food.
    • The songs used for particular characters are different, as are places and names. Instead of John Powell's orchestral score, there is a fuller use of a pretty wide-ranging set of music from Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper, The Who, The Ramones and later-era Beatles as the soundtrack, which are explicitly noted in the screenplay.
    • Mumble's capture and imprisonment in the zoo is expanded and, aided by the narration, much more disturbing. It's also said that he spends a year inside. After he saves the penguin colony, we're also explicitly told the reason why the world governments backed off of fishing - which is not purely out of concern for the penguins, but because this event is just enough to push prior bills to ban overfishing through, and also because it could mean they're a sentient, cognitive species trying to communicate.
    • The ending is also different, instead of the huge, hallucinogenic dance number we see at the end of the finished movie, we leave Mumble as he watches Ella (Gloria in the finished film) walk off into the mist with the rest of the wives, with his chick on his feet , and worries about her safety. We then pan out to reveal shadowy forms watching Earth from way above - who decides to pull away from harvesting our sun for energy, because we find out they resemble penguins, somehow. Shiny, translucent, giant alien penguins. As they walk away into the dark of the ship, one of them dances a tiny jig.
  • Also, some Happy Feet storybooks and posters show Mumble as a fully-fledged Emperor Penguin. This is because until late in the film's production, it was intended for Mumble to lose his down feathers during his pursuit of the fishing fleet. However, it was decided that Mumble would keep half of his juvenile down throughout the story, to make him different to the other Emperor Penguins. Here are a few images of adult Mumble:
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  • Mumble moulting:
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  • The film was originally announced to also be released in IMAX 3D, but it was later dropped, as it would have used up a lot of the budget. There are a few scenes where it's noticeable that it was originally to be in 3D, however. The 3D effect was present in the second film, most likely due to the revive of the format.
  • Some art books and press releases include an image of a different version of the elephant seal scene. The image shows them with a much friendlier, more boisterous demeanor, and they would have been named Cletus and Jeb, suggesting they would have been hillbilly Americans rather than their final portrayal as working-class Australians. One tidbit of leaked information revealed that Cletus was voiced by Robin Williams.
  • A deleted scene depicts Mumble, during his pursuit of the alien ships, running into a blue whale and having a conversation with an albatross voiced by Steve Irwin. The scene would have wreaked havoc with the film's pacing, so instead we go straight from Mumble's pursuit of the aliens to his washing up on shore. In order to keep Irwin in the film, the above elephant seal scene was modified.
  • If what Gabriel Iglesias said is to be believed, he was actually meant to star in the film when he was starting out, but was talked out by his manager, feeling that his stand up was where he belonged. He regrets not starring in it because not only did the film succeed, but whatever role he was gonna have went to Robin Williams.