‘Happy Feet’ director leads the way for footloose hero

Australian filmmaker George Miller says his gritty “Mad Max” action adventures, which brought Mel Gibson to fame in the U.S. in the early 1980s, actually have a lot in common with his family films such as “Babe” (which he produced and co-wrote), “Babe: Pig in the City” and his computer-animated penguin musical, “Happy Feet,” which opens Friday.

“Most of the stories I tell quite unwittingly seem to be similar stories about outsiders who basically have to find their way in the world,” Miller says. “The bottom line is, I follow the hero myth. It is never intentional, it’s just the way the stories go.”

Miller’s latest little hero is an adorable, blue-eyed emperor penguin named Mumble (voiced by Elijah Wood). Emperor penguins sing when they are looking for a mate, and they can identify each other through their songs.

Except Mumble, that is. His fellow penguins ostracize him because he can’t sing. But he can dance like Fred Astaire -- or, more accurately, like Savion Glover. Thanks to the computerized “performance-capture” technology, Glover was able to provide Mumble’s nifty dance moves.

Initially, Miller thought he and his crew would go to Antarctica to photograph live penguins and use that footage for the background penguins in “Happy Feet.” But he decided against it.

“Penguins are not domestic animals, and you can’t really train them,” he says. “Also, there’s a difficulty filming in that landscape. It is a very delicate environment, and to take film crews there particularly would interrupt their lives. It would be wrong to do it.”

Besides, he adds, tests demonstrated that the computer could successfully animate realistic penguins and landscapes. And more.

“There was singing and dancing [in the initial concept], but I thought we wouldn’t be able to go into close-ups,” Miller says. “I thought we wouldn’t have as many penguins. I didn’t think we would be able to put them in formations as much as we could. I didn’t think we could get the light into the faces or the eyes.”

Miller began production on “Happy Feet” in early 2003, two years before the release of the popular documentary “March of the Penguins.” His inspiration was David Attenborough’s 1993 TV documentary “Life in the Freezer.”

“I had no idea that the emperor penguins live such extraordinary lives. And then when I saw their sense of community, the way they share the warmth, and that they identify and imprint with each other in song, that blew me away,” Miller says.

The filmmaker admits he can’t sing or dance but has always loved the “kinetics and the narratives” of musicals.

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-- Susan King