Fun While It Lasted

So much for penguins' cinematic heyday. Surf's Up got soundly trounced at the box office over the weekend, proving that one needs more than just penguins for movie success. For starters, a plot that doesn't make people say "WTF?!" during the trailers would be nice. IMDB summarizes the plot as

A stylistically daring CGI feature, "Surf's Up" is based on the groundbreaking revelation that surfing was actually invented by penguins. In the film, a documentary crew will take audiences behind the scenes and onto the waves during the most competitive, heartbreaking and dangerous display of surfing known to man, the Penguin World Surfing Championship.

I really can't blame the penguins for that movie, though, even if it dooms other, better penguin feature presentations. Someone at Sony had to say, "An animated mockumentary about pudgy, ice-dwelling flightless birds having invented a quintessentially warm-water sport? Sure, let's throw a few million dollars at that idea!" I can only hope that person is scraping guano at Sea World.

Now, I am a certifiable penguin person, and even I looked at that trailer and said, "I don't think so." How certifiably penguin am I? I actually switched my laptop's operating system so I could Go Penguin, so getting me to say "no thanks" to anything penguin-related is quite the feat. In the case of Surf's Up, it was a battle between the penguinophile in me and my innate desire to not have something in my brain pop and start leaking out my ears after 85 minutes of cognitive dissonance.

Penguins...surfing...penguins...surfing...TILT!