Guest Blogger: Hailley Movie 2

The 2005 DreamWorks animation, Madagascar takes place at the Central Park Zoo in New York City where we meet the four main characters, Marty the Zebra, Melman the Giraffe, Alex the Lion and Gloria the Hippo. On Marty’s tenth birthday he wishes to go to the wild even though the zoo animals are pampered daily. That night Marty breaks out from the zoo and is released into another wild, New York City. Like good friends, Gloria, Alex and Melman go looking for him and eventually find him at Grand Central Station where the police end up detaining them. As a result, the four friends are put in wood crates and set on a ship headed for Africa, though along the way they fall of into the water and wash upon the shore of what they thought was Sand Francisco. After meeting the native animals and learning that the place they washed up on was Madagascar who knows if they will ever make it home. There are many big name actors and actress who are the voices of the zoo animals such as Chris Rock who is the voice of Marty. Also, Ben Stiller is the voice of Alex the Lion, David Schwimmer is the voice of Melman the Giraffe and Jada Pinkett Smith is the voice of Gloria the Hippo. All of the actors and actress who played the main four characters were superb when bringing the characters to life making them humorous and have true emotions. The most memorable characters in the film were also habitants of the Central Park Zoo who escaped from the zoo by digging a hole in the ground with a plastic spoon. There memorable characters are the psychotic penguins, while at the zoo they pretend to be cute and cuddly even though in future they ended up knocking out the ship captain and hijacking the ship. The main theme in this film is the importance of friendship and how with friends you can go farther and accomplish more than by yourself. Thus, audience can relate to their own friendship and memories that they have had with them. I do not agree with Roger Ebert when he says, “It'll be fun for the smaller kids, but there's not much crossover.” As a seventeen year old I still find humor in the character and how the animation has created characters you can relate to. Madagascar is worth anyone’s time even if they are not a child; even an adult find humor in stress situations with the four main characters when they got lost in the wild. I encourage anyone to purchase Madagascar because it’s a good film to watch multiple times.