Happy Feet: Unidentified Flying Objections

Happy Feet offers an interesting message to our children. The new animated feature is visually striking; though it crucially cannot convincingly convey its own central image, that of a penguin tap dancing. But a large part of the theme of the piece seems to be that religion is a bad thing.

There are two obviously religious figures in the movie: an old penguin with a Scottish accent, “Noah the Elder,” who advocates the worship of a divine penguin, “Guin,” and who is the recognized religious leader of the flock; and a fat rockhopper penguin, “Lovelace,” with bit of plastic lid from a six-pack stuck around his neck as a “sacred talisman,” who leads another group. Noah obviously represents Calvinism: he is mortally opposed, of course, to dancing. He is also opposed to all new ideas, all non-conformity. And, the movie points out, he contradicts himself. Not a sympathetic portrayal of one large branch of Christianity.

Lovelace, equally obviously, represents Pentecostalism. He claims to have the answers to all questions, thanks to his “mystic inspiration”; but demands money before he will pronounce. He is also sexually profligate, and admits later to being a plain fraud.

There is one more religious image—of a small church on a hill. It appears at the end of a journey, and I thought briefly that it might represent some sort of positive reference. But no—the camera’s eye sweeps down the hill, to pollution below. It is there only, I gather, to show hypocrisy, as introduction to and apparent symbol for a race of beings referred to as “the destroyers” (humans, of course). They kill everything that comes near and leave the waters littered with garbage. Presumably if the church were not there this would not be so.

Talk about being clubbed on the head like a baby seal with anti-Christian propaganda.

These harsh caricatures might be acceptable, and lift the film out of the realm of mere hate speech, if the movie offered some valid spiritual, and, properly, recognizably Christian, alternative. But what is its proposed truth, to answer man’s and penguin’s spiritual strivings? To solve the intractable problems of the world?

UFOs. No kidding. UFOs and alien abductions. Okay, and maybe an international ban on fishing. No credulously believing in things like God and the afterlife here; our children are urged instead to believe that our ultimate welfare is in the hands of a superior race of alien beings. And what is our proper response to this revelation? Simple: they will treat us well if we are cute and can amuse them.

I worry. The same day we saw the movie together, I was sitting with my five year old, and talking with him about a Christmas tree. He pointed to the star on top, and I told him it represented the star in the night sky over Bethlehem that guided the wise men to the baby Jesus.

He turned to me and responded, matter-of-factly, “There is no Jesus.”

Where, at his age, is he getting this? Not growing up in a family of practicing Catholics. At kindergarten? On the playground? Or from the media?

Talking, tapdancing penguins he has no trouble with. But Jesus? Obviously piffle.



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To be fair, perhaps here I should give my own opinion of the whole UFO-visiting-aliens concept. That aliens from other planets are visiting earth, I have no problem with. Yet, as I understand it, requires some of the accepted laws of physics to be overcome. Of course, our knowledge is not perfect, and this may be possible. But believing in aliens is therefore obviously unscientific, in a way believing in God clearly is not.

Second, let’s allow that some other group of physical beings might be sufficiently advanced in material technology to be capable of visiting our planet. Why would they want to? Presumably, if they are that advanced, there is nothing much we can offer them in either material or intellectual terms. If there were, what could be worthwhile hauling back across those vast interstellar distances?

All I can think of is scientific study, or the idle curiosity we feel visiting a zoo. But if so, such a materially advanced civilization would surely have no need to come here physically. They could accomplish as much with, say, captured light and radio waves; at an extreme, with robot drones.

No, Occam’s Razor assumes that, when they are not swamp gas or weather balloons, UFOs are much more likely to be spiritual or mental than physical entities.