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Mumble and his Adelie friends have returned to the Emperor colony so that Mumble (Elijah Wood) can try once again to woo Gloria (voiced by Brittany Murphy). His attempt to mime while Ramon (Robin Williams) sings My Way has not fooled her, but his dancing gets the whole colony on the move.
Curator’s notes
The idea of a ‘heart song’ comes from the fact that Emperor penguins do use vocalisations to attract a mate, although tap dancing is not actually part of the ritual. One of George Miller’s more inspired ideas is to see the story as a live action musical and to use many of the techniques of the modern large-scale dance film. Musical animation had always been a form in which the number of figures was usually kept to a minimum, because each figure in a traditional cell animation was hand-drawn. The more characters in a scene, the more work. Digital animation has changed that, because it can replicate multiple characters more easily – hence, the possibility of a phalanx of 50 tapping penguins, in a colony of 500,000!
