Madagascar Escape 2 Africa starts from where Madagascar left off ...

ln Madagascar Escape 2 Africa, David Schwimmer is Melman, a neurotic, insecure giraffe who subdues his feelings for Gloria, a sizable, voluptuous hippo voiced by Jada Pinkett Smith. This romantic interlude has left me with a couple of moral questions for my grey matter to pound away. How can there ever be a union between a hippo and giraffe? Maybe we'll find out in the sequel to this film.

Madagascar isn't the only franchise invested with extreme genetic mix-breeding. Shrek has a better spin on the angle. Instead of the princess marrying the ogre, or having the ogre turn into a prince, it's better to turn the princess into an ogre (as if ogres have a better health plan or something). I guess the offer is on only for magical creatures (ala Donkey's dragon-donkey younglings from the second Shrek movie).

Apart from cross-culture consummation, Escape 2 Africa also shares Shrek's ideology of being better than its predecessor. Like all sequels, it is a pricier, fancier, laugh-riot with a quick wit and a number of throwaway characters. Unlike most, the throwaway characters run off with the movie. Nana, the old woman who had beat up Alex the lion (Ben Stiller) at the Grand Central Station, stages a rebellion with a group of marooned tourists. And Skipper (Tom McGarth), with his cuckoo group of elite spy penguins lashes out enough surreal nonsense and deadpan humor to spin off a batch of penguin movies (a short was released with the original film and a series is in the works).

Even Makunga (Alec Baldwin), a would-be alpha male lion who is a send-off of Scar (Jeremy Irons) from The Lion King is a throwaway character. And the guy's a villain. There is a scene at the beginning which lampoons Lion King, where Makunga faces off against Zuba (Bernie Mac), and their fight is less the gruesome slashing-fight-to-the-death and more of a professional WWE brawl.

The movie has Alex and Co. leaving Madagascar in a rickety-wreck of a plane engineered by the penguins and end up crash landing in Africa, where Alex discovers his parents (he was kidnapped by poachers in a flashback at the beginning of the film). Marty (Chris Rock), meets up with a horde of zebras and discovers that he's not as individual as he thought he was. Gloria discovers novel-like romance with a potential mate (Moto-Moto voiced by Will-I-Am) and Melman discovers that he has two days to live.

Escape 2 Africa, in a sense, is a little about discovering one's identity, which is pretty much a tried and tested stratagem in animated films (Ice Age, Lion King, Aladdin), and it works well, especially with Eric Darnell and Garth — the film's directors — catapulting the story (and the camera) every which way they can.

In fact, the film's cinematography is a major vantage, which distracts the aware for a nanosecond into mistaking the animated into a proper film (cinematographer Guillermo Navarro consulted). At the end of the day Escape 2 Africa is the directors' graduation into major league film-makers and not just animation directors, and who carry off an oft-used plot without the need for major voice actors. Well, not without Chris Rock.

Released by Paramount and DreamWorks, the film runs around 90 minutes with voices of Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, David Schwimmer, Jada Pinkett Smith, Sacha Baron Cohen, Alec Baldwin, Bernie Mac, Cedric the Entertainer, Will-I-Am, , Sherri Shepherd, Andy Richter, Conrad Vernon and Tom McGrath. It is directed by Eric Darnell and McGrath, and written by Etan Cohen, Darnell and McGrath.

Madagascar Escape 2 Africa is PG with photorealistic backgrounds and killer penguins. It's fun when standard escapist fare turns out this good... it's just that the giraffe and hippo mating is still boggling my mind no end.

 SECOND OPINION

Splashes of colour, an odd assortment of animals (who are absurdly good friends) and cute militant penguins Yup, all these remind me of Madagascar, an animated film I had not had the pleasure of watching or writing about a few years ago because of lukewarm response on my part.

However, the impact of Madagascar Escape 2 Africa is anything but lukewarm or impersonal, and it can easily be named along with Shrek 2 in the list of sequels which are better than their predecessors

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Escape 2 Africa starts from where Madagascar left off. Alex the dancing lion (Ben Stiller), Marty the adventurous zebra (Chris Rock), Gloria the vivacious hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith) and neurotic Melman the giraffe (David Schwimmer) board a rickety plane helmed and constructed by the malevolent Skipper and his troop of combatant penguins with plans to slingshot towards New York. Instead, they crash land on an animal reserve in Africa.

Connecting to an earlier scene — and the plot — Alex is reunited with his separated father Zuba (voiced by the late Bernie Mac) and mother (Sherri Shepherd, whose name in the movie is Alex's Mom) completes the full circle of Disney's The Lion King with a villain in the shape of Makunga, (wickedly voiced by Alec Baldwin) whose likeability factor lunges over Jeremy Irons' from the film. Alec Baldwin's slyness and humour vibrates though Makunga makes his pompous behaviour all the more lively.

The part of Marty is a bit shorter from the last movie as Alex's part is beefed up. Wacky lemur King Julien (Sacha Baron Cohen) and his obedient lackey Maurice (Cedric the Entertainer) gives the weirdest laughs and continues the trend of being the only obnoxious characters.

The most refreshing part of Escape 2 Africa is that the animals look nothing like the actors playing them. This time around the body language of the animals was more in tune with their human counterparts, making them brighter, livelier, genuinely hilarious and more photorealistic. The leads also share ample space to develop and utilise every simple plot and subplot (vacationing New Yorkers and their survival story is one of the uproarious threads of the story).

Everything of course is credited to the still-intact writer/director team from the original, Eric Darnell, Tom McGrath and Etan Cohen who share writing credits, transforming nonsensical wackiness into pure humoristic fiesta. — Farheen Jawaid