New York Comic-Con: "Penguins of Madagascar" and "Home"

The Dreamworks/Fox animation panel at New York Comic-Con Sunday morning was expertly moderated by RogerEbert.com's own Susan Wloszczyna. She presented the directors of two upcoming films, November’s “Penguins of Madagascar” and March 2015’s “Home.” Both, she told us, “have a lot of fun with Hollywood genres,” tweaking and in some cases completely upending the assumptions and conventions we are accustomed to seeing.

“I loved the idea of thrusting the penguins into a 1960’s James Bond movie with a totally crazy villain,” grinned “Penguins of Madagascar” co-director Simon J. Smith. And who better to play that totally crazy villain, an octopus who disguises himself as a man called Dr. Octavius Brine, than John Malkovich? “He was totally committed,” Smith told us, describing the actor waving his arms around in the recording booth as he performed. “It was fantastic fuel for the animators.” Malkovich was their first choice for the role. “We wanted a villain you could never forget, crazy, unexpected, a gravitas.” 

There’s also a smooth James Bond-style master spy, a wolf who, according to Wloszczyna, is “a bit of a fox.” That is in large part due to the voice of Benedict Cumberbatch, as an operative of an organization called The North Wind.

Co-director Eric Darnell explained that the story is more a spin-off than a sequel, and is a separate “penguin reality” parallel to the television series (“The Penguins of Madagascar” – note the “The”). It begins just after “Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted,” with the penguins in the circus, but then takes them on a “fantastic worldwide adventure,” from Venice to Shanghai, the Gobi Desert, the South Pacific, and…Kentucky. Attendees got the first look at a very funny scene in which our heroes break into Fort Knox, in search of something even more precious than gold. 

We also saw a hilarious scene where the efforts of the octopus to deliver his threats are impeded by his inability to make the video chat interface work. “It’s like talking to my parents,” the wolf mutters after repeated efforts to get him to click on the microphone in the corner of the screen. 

And, as an extra treat, we saw a six-minute segment that included the penguins’ origin story, explaining how they left Antarctica and why that poor private is so devoted to the Skipper. The film opens Thanksgiving weekend.

What “Penguins of Madagascar” does to the classic spy movies, “Home” does to alien invasion films. Tim Johnson (“Antz”) talked to Wloszczyna about “Home,” based on the Adam Rex book, The True Meaning of Smekday. 

It’s the story of Oh (“Big Bang Theory’s” Jim Parsons), an alien from a nomadic population called Boov, led by Captain Smek (Steve Martin). In a short that appeared in theaters before “Peabody and Mr. Sherman,” we learned that the Boov have had many failures in their search for a new planet to inhabit. In “Home,” they decide that Earth seems just right. In 28 seconds they conquer the humans (their ability to control gravity helps), and then they relocate the entire population to a preserve in Australia.