You'll love the penguins.
There are four of them, and they're determined to blow the Central Park Zoo and hightail it to the tribal homeland of Antarctica.
They talk like '30s-issue tough guys and they're unafraid of anything. At one point they hijack a ship and tie up the captain. Whenever he acts wise, he gets whacked with a moist flipper. Or would that be a wing?
Unfortunately, the penguins only make up about a fifth of Madagascar, an otherwise pretty much by-the-pixel digitally animated kids' movie about four variously dysfunctional urban zoo escapees — Alex the jungle-struck Zebra (Chris Rock), Marty the celebrity lion (Ben Stiller), Gloria the go-girl hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith) and Melman the hypochondriac giraffe (David Schwimmer) — who find themselves among thousands of bulgy-eyed lemurs on the island named by the title.
Like a great many recent studio-released feature-length digital cartoons — all of which are even beginning to look the same — Madagascar is constructed as a series of incidental gags, mostly involving parent-pleasing pop-culture references, strung along a conventional there's-no-place-like-home storyline.
In this case, the lesson to be learned by these wayward zoological inmates is that the wild isn't all it's cracked up to be — especially if you're a lion and the mere proximity to all this Darwinism brings out the beast in you. Naturally — or not as it turns out — they decide they'll take Manhattan.
If Madagascar follows what has very quickly become the dominant formula for computer-generated cartoonery of this type — i.e., talking animals/bugs/fish/robots/ogres go on self-seeking journey and encounter world full of baby-boom pop-cult references — this at least ensures some amusing activity on the margins.
These movies tend to live or die on the quality of their incidental gags. Luckily, this one has some sparkling marginalia. Apart from the penguins (whose arrival in Antarctica is the movie's single funniest moment), there's the Oxbridge-accented monkey with a fixation on "flinging poo" when threatened and the insanely vainglorious king of the lemurs, a first-rate mangler of the king's English with an East Indian accent and a proclivity for sublimely absurd non-sequiturs.
Interestingly, very many of these movies are about revolutions: Ants going Spartacus, robots overthrowing corporate production standards, animals bolting from the zoo. But the revolution you'd really like to see is the one that finally takes this still relatively new technology and does something truly different with it.
The fact is, apart from certain superficial visual distinctions, virtually all of the recent studio-produced, star-voiced computer-animated movies feel like they could have been produced on different assembly lines in the same factory.
If there's a revolt called for, that's where it should begin.