With Madagascar, DreamWorks Animation once again proves that celebrity voices and random pop-culture references do not a quality animated film make. Like Shark Tale and the Shrek series, Madagascar is packed with recognizable names (all of which are conspicuously mentioned in the opening credits, to the exclusion of any other information about the film) who do nothing but distract from the already flimsy story. Although not as relentless with its empty references as Shark Tale, Madagascar nevertheless scores its easiest laughs with meaningless quotations from popular movies and songs, and it all hangs on a story even flimsier than Shark Tale's.
It takes almost 40 minutes for the film to even get to its titular island location, where New York City zoo animals Alex the neurotic lion (voiced by Stiller), Marty the daydreaming zebra (Rock), Melman the hypochondriac giraffe (Schwimmer) and Gloria the sassy hippo (Pinkett Smith) end up after a series of mishaps separate them from their urban home. Marty is elated, but Alex wants nothing more than to go home, especially since exposure to the wild brings out his carnivorous instincts. There are some halfhearted lessons about friendship and staying true to yourself, but it's never clear what exactly we're supposed to care about happening to these characters.
Especially in a movie nominally aimed at children, it seems like a basic conflict driving the plot would be warranted. Instead, Madagascar just meanders from unfunny gag to unfunny gag, relying on its celebrity stars to sell the weak material. Ironically, then, it's the penguins and monkeys voiced by a number of the film's animators who get the biggest laughs; a movie about them without bland moralizing would have been much more interesting. Stiller and Schwimmer both whine gratingly in basic variations on their standard characters, and none of the main voice actors seems to be trying very hard (or even at all).
Not as crass and patronizing as Shark Tale nor as endearing as the original Shrek, Madagascar occupies a middle ground of mediocre, phoned-in semi-entertainment, which more and more appears to be DreamWorks Animation's stock in trade.