An unseasonable tornado ripped through North Carolina last night and killed at least ten people. It was 62 degrees in New York City at 1am this morning. On November 16. Global warming keeps hitting closer to home ... and now it's showing up at the movies.

And I'm not even talking about documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth [my review] and The Great Warming and Who Killed the Electric Car?, which generally speak to those already in the know or at least to sophisticated adults able to deal with the concepts involved on an intellectual level. And which can be dismissed by naysayers as artsy-fartsy liberal nonsense. I'm talking about kiddie movies. Earlier this year we had Ice Age: The Meltdown (it's out on DVD next Tuesday), which seems like a pretty grim setting for a movie for the tykes. A dying world? Do we really want the kids falling in love with a nebbishy mammoth and a cranky sabertooth and a weird squirrel-rat thing only to say to them, "Surprise! They're doomed"?

Maybe we do ...

And tomorrow Happy Feet [my review] hits theaters, and it's going to shock a lot of people. This is not simply a cute little movie about adorable dancing penguins. It's a cute litte movie about adorable dancing penguins whose world is dying -- bet you didn't expect to see collapsing icebergs mixed in with the fluffy baby birds -- who discover that we humans are responsible for it and commence to plead with us to fix things so they can continue to live. And none of it is preachy: it all springs from a totally organic story that takes the standard finding-yourself plot and makes it something far more important than, oh, the usual learning how to deal with being teased and getting everyone to come around to seeing you as less a freak than just your own unique self. Here, the weirdo -- the penguin Mumble, who can't sing to save his life, which is very unpenguiny of him, but loves to dance, which is even more unpenguiny -- is not just an outcast but becomes practically a religious revolutionary who forces his people to recognize the need to change in order to survive.

Any resemblance to other creatures -- say, hairless apes who walk upright -- is entirely deliberate.

I say, "Maybe we do want kids to see cute critters enduring the death of their worlds," because these are the kids who, two decades from now, will have to be the driving force behind whatever we're gonna do to save our cities from drowning as the oceans rise, save our civilization from ruins. They will have, unlike their elders, grown up with the idea that global warming is bad, that it kills fluffy animals who don't want to die.

We'll just have to hope that two decades isn't too long to wait. It's 69 degrees in New York City a week before Thanksgiving ....

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MaryAnn Johanson
author of The Totally Geeky Guide to The Princess Bride
minder of FlickFilosopher.com

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