Aside from the rather sappy premise that each penguin has a ‘heart song’ with which they express their inner self and find love, this film has a good message to promote to its young viewers and a few laughs too. Showing environmental issues, in this case over-fishing, from the penguin point of view, we get a cute and cuddly socio-political comic drama.
Mumbo is a penguin without a ‘heart song’. A result of an accident while he was still an egg, Mumbo is instead an excellent tap dancer. Nevertheless, he is rejected by society and blamed for the recent lack of fish. Cast out, he befriends another group of penguins (with Hispanic accents for some reason) and begins to learn of aliens from beyond the ice, who he believes have taken the fish. Determined to solve the fish problem and return to his community (and the penguin he loves – the beautiful Gloria), Mumbo and his friends go on an adventure to find the aliens, who are, of course, us!
What follows is a debate on the attention we should give to other creatures, and the responsibility we have to live alongside them without threatening their lifestyles. Mumbo attracts the attention of the humans with his dancing and soon the make changes, but the message of the film is that we can’t afford to wait for the animals to come to us with some remarkable skill to make us value them – it simply won’t happen – but instead we must constantly bear their needs in mind or risk the extinction of thousands of species whose lives support our own existence in different ways.
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