Happy Feet tells the story of Mumble (voiced by Elijah Wood), a penguin who is distraught to learn that he can't carry a tune—a major problem in the fantasy world Miller has created, since these penguins find their mates by singing to each other. Yet while Mumble can't sing, he's a spectacular dancer, and his gift helps him to woo his girlfriend Gloria (Brittany Murphy) and solve a local food crisis.

If this premise sounds peculiar, that's because it is—Miller's idiosyncratic sensibility leads him to combine romance, elaborate musical set pieces, and thinly veiled political satire into an explosion of vivid colors and sounds that makes the Pixar movies seem positively homogenized. The significance of singing and dancing in the penguins' world allows Miller to indulge his passion for pop culture, with song-and-dance numbers set to everything from Prince to the Beach Boys and Queen. The tunes Miller selects are reconceived and spliced together in a clever fashion that makes Happy Feet a sort of penguin-centric Moulin Rouge. And, like that film, Happy Feet dazzles the viewer with its technical prowess.

Right from an opening shot that begins in outer space before taking the viewer into the world of the penguins, Happy Feet takes full advantage of the latest advances in digital technology to create imagery that echoes Stanley Kubrick's 2001, an influence Miller explicitly acknowledges in one amusing scene. Knowing that he's making a film for audiences with open minds and imaginations, Miller lets his own sense of visual invention run rampant and creates not only impeccably choreographed musical numbers but truly stunning action sequences (as when Mumble and his friends flee from killer whales and other predators). At its best, the movie evokes memories of Bambi and Pinocchio in its combination of childlike wonder with genuine suspense. Miller doesn't condescend to his young viewers, and the seriousness with which he approaches his material places it far above the level of most family fare.

If the picture is a slight disappointment nevertheless, it's only because Miller is competing with himself as the creator of two of the greatest kids' movies ever made. Happy Feet is thoroughly entertaining, but it lacks the emotional weight and flawless story construction of the Babe films. The final scenes feel rushed, and ultimately the movie's greatest strength—its highly original combination of different styles—becomes a liability when the filmmakers fail to bring together the various subplots in a satisfying manner. There's an environmental storyline involving man's interference with the ecosystem that is well-intentioned, but poorly executed-it seems to interrupt the other subplots instead of coexisting with them-and the sweet love story between Mumble and Gloria that drives the film is compromised as a result.

Yet if Happy Feet fails to synthesize all of its elements in the end, those individual components are rich enough to make it a triumph overall. The movie is packed with hilarious and exciting digressions, some of which serve as sly allegories for contemporary political issues. (When Mumble befriends a group of Latin penguins and brings them home, for instance, one of his elders turns out to be an overheated Pat Buchanan type who spews rhetoric against alien influences.) The satirical jabs provide some added amusement for adults, but Happy Feet's greatest appeal will be to kids who see themselves in Mumble as he struggles with his difference before learning to embrace his individuality. The messages about self-definition and refusing to be limited by others' expectations may sound like standard family film platitudes, but Miller clearly believes in these ideas—he's expressing them rather than exploiting them, and this allows him to transcend the clichés that weigh down most kids' movies. Like Disney and Steven Spielberg before him, Miller clearly loves children and knows what entertains them, and his affection for both his audience and the filmmaking process is infectious.