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Elijah, can you sing?
Elijah Wood: “Can I really sing? I can hold a tune. No, my voice is not nearly as bad as Mumble. It was actually kind of great though because I was called on to sing really poorly for the film, and I thought I did a pretty competent job of singing poorly. But they actually digitally made it worse. When I saw the film, like I knew what I had done, but my god, they made it sound horrendous. It's wonderful.”
How about your dancing skills?
Wood: “Again, I've got rhythm, but I wouldn't call myself a competent dancer either.”
Robin, did you travel to Argentina to study penguins?
Robin Williams (in a Latino accent): “I watch a documentary, and the tapes were very good for me. I have not yet been to Argentina, but hopefully I would like to go there. And also to Patagonia - not just the store. But to see these penguins who are small but, once again, very powerful penguins. I would like to see them in their native habitat in Argentina - especially if Warner Brothers wants to pay for a junket. How cool would that be?”
Have you always had a burning desire to sing My Way in Spanish?
Williams: “I have a burning desire (laughter) and many of the people I have been with had to take medication. But it is the idea to sing My Way in memory of… It is a very beautiful song to sing, especially behind another penguin in kind of a Brokeback Mountain, ‘I love you, kind of I can't quit you,’ Mumble, kind of way. George said, ‘Don't go there,’ but it's a subtext like the two gay penguins in the Manhattan Zoo. They were there for a long time, and then one got fed up. ‘I don't know who you are any more. I brought you pebbles and you just sit on them.’ But I wanted to sing that. It's fun to do, especially with the gypsy kings. It's a great thing.”
This is for Mr. Miller. Can you talk about the decision to give Mumble a slow maturation process?
George Miller: “Because we follow him from childhood to young adulthood, it was a question of getting used to the character, one way or the other. We considered having Mumble fully adult at the end of the movie, but the honest truth was I fell in love with him. Normally, you get sick of your characters when you work so long on a movie, but kept falling in love with the character and how he looked. I thought we spent so much time seeing him one way, it helped differentiate him from the other characters, where everyone looks the same.
Plus, there was a kid at school - I went to an all-boys school, typically sports played a lot. And there was this kid that Mumble reminded me of. He matured very late. He didn't develop sex characteristics until a lot of the others were giant footballers and so on. I always remember that kid. He was very feisty. Deep down beneath that soft exterior, there's a lot of steel. His name was Butch. (Elijah laughs.) Somehow, there's a little bit of Butch in Mumble as well. I sort of like the idea of somebody being different. It was just a question of differentiating from everybody else.
Also, he has six million feathers on him. The computing power is huge to do that and once we got him, I didn't want to lose that. So there were a lot of reasons for keeping him that way. I also thought the audience might speculate on whether something did happen to him when the father dropped the egg in the cold, that there was some physical defect. That's up to the audience to decide.”
Elijah, did you feel that Mumble was slow because he was frozen as an egg?
Wood: “No. I sort of see it as a benefit. I don't see the character as having faults but rather having these amazing, unique qualities. When George was talking about the fact that his developmental process is slowed down physically, I think that's almost a way to show that he's different, to separate him from the rest of the penguin community. I feel that his interior is developing faster than the other penguins because he sees and understanding things that they don't. He doesn't have that closed mind. So I always him as much more developed than underdeveloped. I didn't think it necessarily had to do with (his father dropping the egg) on the ice.”
Elijah and Robin, can you talk about doing the vocals? How much was improvised?
Wood: “We were lucky enough to work together most of the time, which is nice. The nature of doing an animated film, oftentimes it's completely based on the actors schedules, and it's not always you get to be in a room with the actors you're meant to be working with. It helps to make the scenes come alive and breathe life into them when you've got other people to play off of.”
Williams: “All the Chicano comics were great. It was a pretty wild group of people to have in one room. Most of them have other gigs, but it was great just to riff. Each one, especially the Al Pacino penguins. Hoo ha! It was a good group to play off of. George would just let us go and pick things and expand on that. That's another luxury you don't normally get. It was fun to do that. I always left there exhilarated because you get to play in a room with other people, which is a gift.”
Robin, you do two voices in the film and you’re the narrator as well…
Williams: “It's the same. Lovelace. Barry White kind of voice (In a Barry White voice) Yeah.”
Was that the plan from the start?
Williams (continuing in the Barry White voice): “I hope so. (Normal voice) There were plans to do more, but we'll have to wait and see if they do Happy Feet on Ice. Doing the character as Barry White, we tried that, and it was (Barry White voice again), ‘Oh, oh, sexy. Bring it good. I want you to get fluffy and down. C'mon, I'm going to ruffle your feathers and do it all right, in that cold Antarctic night. Yeah, girl, we're going to go South. Oh yeah. That's the penguin move that you want. Give you pebbles, yeah.’”
