'Happy' penguins outdance digital humans

"Happy Feet" points out a few things that are still wrong with digital animation.

Now don't get me wrong. I am not saying that the animated hit is a dud, though I confess that I didn't enjoy it as much as some moviegoers clearly have — especially that preachy final third.

But let's focus on the sequence in "Happy Feet" that uses real-life human characters, an odd contrast with the digitally created animal characters.

Not that I blame the filmmakers for using live-action instead of digital humans. Even the folks at Pixar can't create convincing human characters with computers. Just look at the kids in the "Toy Story" movies.

And even when filmmakers scan in the motions of real-life actors and then animate over them, they wind up looking creepy and rubbery, as in "The Polar Express" and "Monster House."

I'm starting to wonder if traditional line-drawn or "cel" animation won't always have a leg up on digital animation with regard to human characters.

IT'S A BAD HOBBIT. As I noted last week, I really don't believe that New Line Cinema will make a movie version of J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit" without director Peter Jackson.

It seems more likely that the reports about New Line officials wanting to do so are simply a bargaining maneuver — a clumsy attempt to get Jackson to drop his suit against the studio over profits from his "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.

Still, the studios involved — New Line and MGM — have reason to be in a rush to get the long-rumored "Hobbit" project underway. If they don't film it in the next year or so, the rights revert back to veteran film producer Saul Zaentz ("Amadeus," "The English Patient"), who has said publicly that he wants to have Jackson involved.

YOU HAVE TO TAKE YOUR LUMPS. Say what you will about filmmaker Kevin Smith, but he has never taken himself too seriously. Well, until recently.

For the past couple of week, the "Clerks II" director has had an ongoing online feud with Orlando Sentinel movie critic Roger Moore, who posted some unkind things about Smith and his fans on Moore's personal Weblog (which can be found at www.orlandosentinel.com).

Admittedly, Moore's blog criticisms do go too far, getting petty and personal, but Smith has taken it one step further, using various Web sites and his Myspace page at www.myspace.com/therealkevinsmith to attack Moore and encourage his fans to do likewise.

I'm not saying filmmakers shouldn't respond to criticism, but Smith himself has criticized other filmmakers in a handful of guest appearances on the "Ebert and Roeper" movie-review program, which makes his actions here seem rather hypocritical.

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E-mail: jeff@desnews.com