Madagascar

The penguins were not invented for this film. They began as a rock band in an abandoned 1998 project called Rockumentary, and Tom McGrath described turning them into a commando unit as putting a special weapons team inside penguins so that aggression plays against cuteness. King Julien was a minor part as written; Sacha Baron Cohen improvised eight minutes of dialogue at his audition and the script was rewritten to enlarge him. Both decisions move the centre of gravity, because the two things most people remember belong to the margins rather than to the four leads. The dramatic engine, Alex’s carnivore instinct turning on his friends, only starts in the final third of an eighty six minute picture; everything before it is a chain of sketches. The look is deliberate too. The PDI team said openly that it would not resemble Shrek or Monsters, Inc., and the backgrounds are modelled on the imaginary jungles of Henri Rousseau, with heavy dark outlines and flat bright colour. For: families who want broad physical comedy and a short running time. Not for: the stretch where Alex hallucinates his friend as a steak and attacks him is harder than the marketing suggests, so know it is coming if your child is sensitive to a friend becoming a threat.