You -- higher mammal! Can you read?

In our continuing quest to get a handle on what's being marketed to children, C and I watched Madgascar a couple of weeks ago. It was fun and the voice casting was good enough -- Sacha Cohen was particularly awesome as King Julien -- but on the whole it felt a bit forced.

We laughed at the right moments and the penguins are as funny as you think they are; there's the usual mix of sight gags for the tikes and puns + pop culture drops for the grownups; musical numbers, big two-dimensional set pieces... worth watching, but somehow it felt like I'd seen it all before in one of the dozen other smash-success animated blockbusters -- right down to the same-old, same-old boy's club / adventuring company that's propelled through the picture.

Whether it's Woody and Buzz Lightyear or Mr. Incredible and Frozone, it's all the same crap and I'm sick of the feisty female sidekick-slash-love interest hovering around the margins of the action, tossing out the occasional bon mot or rolling her eyes at the boys' misadventures.