Madagascar

It’s not easy following green. Had Dreamworks’ animation wing chosen to follow Shrek 2 with Madagascar one might be inclined to see this jungle-to-jungle fable as evidence that the signature studio gumbo of starry voiceovers, pop pastiche and cartoon buffoonery was starting to turn.
Certainly, at a time when Pixar are stretching the medium up, up and away – quite literally, when you think of The Incredibles – the latest efforts from the authors of Shrek seem comparatively staid. Still, after the sloppy fish-paste of last year’s Shark’s Tale, Madagascar can at least be hailed as a return to form.
The film’s pampered menagerie of performing zoo animals – Ben Stiller’s wisecracking lion, Jada Pinkett-Smith’s feisty hippo, David Schwimmer’s hypochondriac giraffe and even Chris Rock’s unnecessarily zany zebra – are mercifully less ingratiating than Will Smith, who led the celebrity draftees last time out.
Trading in impeccable skartoony logic, Madagascar sees Rock’s disgruntled zebra stage a zoo breakout at the behest of some psychotic POW penguins; a stunt which sees the stripy equine and the rest of his mammalian chums bundled off on a one-way trip to Kenya.
Already destined to look out of place in their new environs, the former city-divas seem truly doomed when an en-route mishap leaves them ship-wrecked on the titular tropical island.
Here they must learn to tolerate Sasha Baron-Cohen’s ragga-raver lemur and battle potentially friend-eating urges to go native.
Served up in a riot of animation pratfalls and toddler-friendly scatology-lite, Madagascar’s eagerness to court all possible demographics is occasionally disconcerting.
The lazy pop-culture references, in particular, seem both shovelled on and daintily MOR. I mean, Saturday Night Fever? Planet Of The Apes? Chariots Of Fire? Enough already. Nobody not cryogenically frozen since the early '80s could mistake this for zeitgeist material.
Fortunately, between Stiller’s kvetch and the anarchic design, Madagascar manages to amuse, or at least bemuse while promiscuously courting box-office bucks. Oh, and the hippo’s fluttering eyelashes are most fetching.

85mins. Cert PG. Opens July 15th