Summary

George Miller’s original vision for
Happy Feet
was darker and meant for older viewers, with more adult-oriented themes and disturbing imagery.
The script originally explored deep themes of religion and myth, with elders praying for plentiful fishing seasons and exiling those who went against their ways.
Warner Bros. pushed for a more kid-friendly version of
Happy Feet
, toning down the dark elements to appeal explicitly to children and ensure commercial success.

George Miller, the mastermind behind Mad Max, has one of the most eclectic filmographies of any working director. While his beloved franchise is obviously his main calling card, he’s also worked in the biopic genre with Lorenzo’s Oil, dark fantasy with The Witches of Eastwick, and kid-friendly fare with the Babe films (he wrote the first one and directed Pig in the City). But Miller’s only Oscar to date has been in the Animated Feature category, winning in 2007 for Happy Feet. A jukebox musical about a tap-dancing penguin ostracized by his community certainly seems against type for Miller.

And yet, the original vision for Happy Feet was significantly darker, and more intriguingly, it was more in line with George Miller’s idiosyncratic directorial tendencies. Understandably, Warner Bros. wanted to deliver a more kid-friendly picture since penguins had recently had their pop culture breakout with Madagascar and March of the Penguins. But for the sake of reflecting on what could’ve been, let’s deep-dive into George Miller’s original, stranger, darker vision for Happy Feet.

Happy Feet Was Originally Targeted at Older Viewers
Happy Feet Release Date November 16, 2006 Runtime 108

Despite starting brilliantly, Happy Feet went off the rails in the second half, abruptly shifting to a darker tone when the penguin Mumble journeys to the human world to save his tribe, and it never fully recovers. However, George Miller’s original concept was more in line with the tone of the second half and was intended explicitly for older viewers. The original draft of the script can be found online, and if the final picture felt like golden-age Disney, this was more akin to Watership Down, complete with disturbing imagery, sexual innuendos, and penguins swearing like sailors (best of all, it gives us the gem “s**t-squirter alien creeps”).

The penguin tribe’s fish shortage, a crucial plot point in the final film, was also given more context in the original draft. As early as Mumble’s baby years, the mother penguins have a difficult time finding food to bring back to their children, and over the course of the script, more and more wives are killed during fishing hunts. We also meet various smaller tribes, filled with penguins slowly going insane from starvation, and by the time of the climax, the main tribe is now a fraction of its original size.

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More importantly, the final third of the script is fleshed out much more. In both versions, Mumble travels to the human world, gets captured, and is held in a museum, slowly going insane until he establishes communication with the “aliens” (humans) through his dancing. But in the original draft, he’s held captive for almost a year, and we’re treated to disturbing, almost surrealistic scenes in which scientists experiment on him.

In the final film, the climax involves a worldwide ban on overfishing after a research team captures footage of the penguin tribe dancing. As presented, it felt rushed and too neatly resolved, but Miller’s original version gives us greater context. The bill isn’t passed out of concern for the penguins, but instead, the incident proves enough to push through prior bills to ban fishing, and the governments realize a sentient species is trying to communicate with them. And since this original draft starts with a more consistently adult-oriented edge, these themes feel much more at home and fleshed out than in the final film. Not to mention, it would’ve helped the film stand even further apart from Surf’s Up, another animated penguin project that was released just months after.

Happy Feet Once Had a Mythic, Sci-Fi Bent

But more significantly, the original vision for Happy Feet felt considerably more in line with the rest of George Miller’s filmography. Throughout his career, Miller has been fascinated with myths and religion as a way to make sense of reality, most notably in Mad Max and the underrated Three Thousand Years of Longing, a lovely treatise on the power of storytelling. While the concept of religion was present in the final version of Happy Feet, as depicted through the penguin tribes trying to understand a race of humans they didn’t understand, it admittedly felt half-baked.

The original draft of the script explores this idea more thoroughly, having scenes that explore the tribe’s culture and inner workings, with the elders repeatedly praying to their gods to deliver them a plentiful fishing season. This also gives greater context to their decision to exile Mumble halfway through; since he goes against their tribe’s ways of communicating through song, they believe he’s fallen from grace and responsible for their dwindling fish. Of course, the mythic dynamic is played more straight in the climax, when Mumble proves the savior of his tribe and brings them salvation (and their fish).

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However, the most fascinating thing about the original draft is its grounding in science fiction. There was already a bit of a backdrop to this in the final film, as the penguins believed the humans were aliens and saw the seizure of their fish as something akin to an abduction. Much of the imagery already alluded to something otherworldly; the film opens in space before flying down into Antarctica, and the closing credits feature dancing penguins in front of an astral backdrop. But initially, this imagery was more than window-dressing – it foreshadowed a surprising twist in the closing moments.

As Mumble wanders off with his lover Ella (Gloria in the final film), the camera pulls to outer space, where we see alien lifeforms preparing to harvest Earth for energy (there exists concept art for this scene, and it was only scrapped a year before release). In a sort of weird irony, this places the humans in a similar fate as the penguins, but the aliens catch a transmission of the dancing penguins and decide to move on to another galaxy. The reason why? The final shot reveals that the aliens resemble giant emperor penguins.

Happy Feet Ultimately Went More Kid Friendly

While this original vision for Happy Feet is admirably bonkers and arguably explains the mid-film tonal shift, executives at Warner Bros. thought having possibly one of the darkest kid’s movies ever would diminish their commercial prospects. Under their supervision, Miller toned down the coarseness and appealed more explicitly to children, and just a year before release, he was also forced to cut his ending and close the picture on a more crowd-pleasing note.

Obviously, the gamble paid off, as evidenced by its huge box office success, reaching $384 million and Oscar win. Still, we would’ve been fascinated to see Miller’s original unfiltered vision in whatever form it took. And, of course, seeing swearing penguins in action is too good a prospect to pass up. Happy Feet is available to rent on Prime Video and iTunes.