Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (2008)
Directed by Eric Darnell
Alex, Marty, and other zoo animals find a way to escape from Madagascar when the penguins reassemble a wrecked airplane. The precariously repaired craft stays airborne just long enough to make it to the African continent. There the New Yorkers encounter members of their own species for the first time. Africa proves to be a wild place, but Alex and company wonder if it is better than their Central Park home.
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3 films that influenced Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa
What critics say influenced Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa
If you smell a whiff of The Lion King in all of it, that's no accident.
However, in a cheeky spin on The Lion King, wannabe alpha big cat Makunga (Alec Baldwin) resents the new arrivals and engineers Alex’s banishment from the colourful waterhole community.
Alex finds his parents—the late Bernie Mac provides the voice of daddy Zuba, big mane on campus—and with obvious allusions to Scar in "The Lion King," Alec Baldwin lends his sterling basso distrusto voice to jealous Makunga, a petty and venal lion indeed, who exploits naive, showbizzy Alex for his own political gain.
Hey, it's still an improvement, clichés and all - and it must be noted, those parts of the sequel which don't steal from Madagascar are quite content to steal from a host of other, better movies, with The Lion King being a particularly obvious influence.
Zuba and his wife (Sherri Shepherd) are overjoyed to be reunited with Alex, and he with them—but, in a plot twist lifted straight out of The Lion King, Zuba also has a brother, Makunga (Alec Baldwin), who is itching to lead the lions in Zuba's place.
The storyline is derivative yet passablereally, it copies too much off of 1994's "The Lion King"but the crass gags and forgettable script keep it from being the charmer it should have been.
Children will enjoy the ride, yet older folks will find it especially entertaining, provided they catch the many pop-culture references flung their direction, whether to the mini-series Roots, the theme music from Born Free, the Spaghetti Western scores of Ennio Morricone, or the choreography of Bob Fosse and Jerome Robbins.
A modest improvement on the 2005 original, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa continues the adventures of four displaced zoo animals: Alex the metrosexual lion (voiced by Ben Stiller), Marty the smart-mouthed zebra (Chris Rock), Melman the Seinfeldian giraffe (David Schwimmer) and Gloria the girly hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith).
Instead, they maroon them on the African mainland for what amounts to more of the same: a shrill retread of the 2005 animated hit "Madagascar."
In a hugely entertaining, lightning-fast, ceaselessly funny follow-up to the adorable 2005 animated hit, our wisecracking animal gang attempt to fly back to the New York zoo from Madagascar but wind up on the wild African plains.
But instead, they crash-land not far from the island of Madagascar: on the continent of Africa, in fact, and in the very animal preserve where Alex the lion (voice of Ben Stiller ) was born.
Madagascar 2 isn't about story, so its combination of elements from The Lion King , Finding Nemo , and Joe Versus the Volcano represents the maximum narrative density one could reasonably expect from this movie.