Fun adventure for children (Madagascar (DVD))

Member Name: dangaroo

Product:	Madagascar (DVD)
Date:	12/09/09 (28 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Strong characters, bright animations, soundtrack

Disadvantages: Some of the voices are annoying for non kids

I'd been giving these Children and Animation films a miss - having found the Shrek films fairly awful. I had a change of heart a while back though when I thoroughly enjoyed Ratatouille. I approached Madagascar with extreme caution though as it was definitely more of a blockbuster than Ratatouille and I find David Schwimmer annoying, Ben Stiller relatively annoying in the majority of cases, if I found the voices annoying - surely the characters wouldn't appeal?

Last weekend I was doing a touch of babysitting and decided to sit down with my baby daughter and watch Madagascar, it wasn't long in to the film that the novelty of the brightly coloured animations had worn off and she had dozed off - I had actually quite got into it by then and decided to watch the rest of the film.

Obviously this film is geared towards kids and doesn't quite have the more wider audience that Ratatouille does, the voices are extremely childish and those of the lion and zebra could be considered quite wearing after a while, the soundtrack is quite fun and the animals do have strong characters. I particularly liked the penguins which tended to have quite an evil side to them - they pulled this off quite well, considering that evilness is not something I would usually relate to a penguin.

The storyline could be considered as fairly exciting and adventurous for a child and it has one of those cheesy moral storyline type things "Don't eat your friends" as the lion struggles with his carnivore habits of wanting to eat his best friend the zebra once out of a zoo surrounding.

Well it's back to babysitting this weekend and I think that we may get round to watching Madagascar 2 at some point.

Summary: Not as good as Ratatouille but good