Madagascar (2005 film)

A zebra named Marty lived his entire life at the Central Park Zoo with his best friends since childhood: a lion named Alex, who is Marty's best friend, a giraffe named Melman and a hippopotamus named Gloria. Alex enjoys showing off for the public and his celebrity status as "the king of New York". Marty, on the other hand, has grown bored with his daily routine and longs to experience the wild. On Marty's tenth birthday, Alex, Melman and Gloria attempt to cheer him up, but Marty, still unsatisfied, learns that the zoo's penguins—Skipper, Kowalski, Rico, and Private—are trying to escape, and follows them out. Alex, Melman and Gloria pursue Marty and attempt to convince him to return. The four, along with the penguins and two chimpanzees named Mason and Phil, converge at Grand Central Station where the authorities sedate them using tranquillizer guns. Under pressure from anti-captivity activists, the zoo is forced to ship the escaped animals by sea to a Kenyan wildlife preserve. During their travels, the penguins escape and take over the ship, intent on taking it to Antarctica. Their antics on the bridge cause the crates containing Alex, Marty, Melman, and Gloria to fall overboard and wash ashore on Madagascar.

The animals come across a pack of lemurs led by King Julien XIII. The predatory fossa attack the lemurs, but are scared off by Alex's fearsome appearance. Alex blames Marty for the group's predicament and attempts to signal for help to get back to civilization. Marty finds the wild to be exactly what he was looking for, and Gloria and Melman soon join him in enjoying the island. Alex eventually comes around, but without the raw steaks he was provided at the zoo, hunger sets in and his prey drive begins to show. King Julien has the lemurs befriend the zoo animals in the hope that Alex's presence will keep the fossa at bay, despite his adviser Maurice's warnings about Alex's predatory nature. When Alex loses control and attacks Marty, King Julien realizes that he is a threat and banishes him to the predator side of the island, where the fossa live. Seeing what Alex has become, and how dangerous the wild can be, Marty begins to regret his decision to leave the zoo.

The penguins, having found Antarctica to be inhospitable, land the ship at Madagascar. Seeing the chance to return Alex to New York, Marty crosses over to the predator side and attempts to convince the scared, starving Alex to return, but Alex refuses out of fear that he will attack Marty again. The fossa attack Marty, and though Gloria, Melman, and the penguins come to the rescue, they are outnumbered. Alex overcomes his predatory instincts, rescues his friends, and scares the fossa away from the lemur territory forever. The lemurs regain their respect for Alex, and the penguins satisfy his hunger by feeding him sushi. As the lemurs throw a farewell celebration for the foursome, the penguins decide not to break the news that the ship has run out of fuel, thus leaving them stranded on the island.

David Schwimmer at the film's British premiere in London

• Ben Stiller as Alex, a lion. Tom McGrath explained that "Ben Stiller was the first actor we asked to perform, and we knew we wanted his character, Alex, to be a big performing lion with a vulnerable side."[3]
• Chris Rock as Marty, a plains zebra. McGrath explained the character: "Marty is a guy who thinks there might be more to life than what's in the zoo. We wanted his character to be energetic, so we listened to Chris Rock."[3]
• David Schwimmer as Melman, a hypochondriac reticulated giraffe who is afraid of germs.[3] When they were looking for a voice actor for Melman, they listened to Schwimmer's voice on Friends and, according to McGrath, thought that it "sounded really neat."[3] During development, Melman the Giraffe was originally supposed to be an okapi but was changed to a giraffe.[4]
• Jada Pinkett Smith as Gloria, a strong, confident, but sweet hippopotamus.[3] McGrath said that they found all these traits in Pinkett Smith's voice when they listened to her.[3]
• Sacha Baron Cohen as King Julien XIII, a ring-tailed lemur and the king of the lemurs. King Julien was initially only meant to be a "two-line" character until auditioning Baron Cohen improvised eight minutes of dialogue in an Indian accent.[5]
• Cedric the Entertainer as Maurice, an aye-aye and King Julien's royal advisor and best friend (to whom Julien never listens).
• Andy Richter as Mort, a Goodman's mouse lemur who is King Julien and Maurice's best friend.
• Tom McGrath as Skipper, the leader of the penguins. McGrath, who was also the film's co-director and co-writer, initially only lent his voice to the temporary tracks.[6][7] Growing up with films starring tough actors like John Wayne, Charlton Heston, and Robert Stack, the latter of whom McGrath wanted for the voice of Skipper.[8] Stack was approached about voicing the character, but died two weeks before production on the animation began.[8][9][10] After that, DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg decided to keep the temporary voice, with McGrath explaining: "People were used to me doing that voice. We knew it worked when we screened it."[8] Many of the character's traits were based on Stack's work.[10] McGrath especially emphasized The Untouchables, a 1959 television crime drama series starring Stack.[10]
• Chris Miller as Kowalski, a penguin and Skipper's right hand.[6]
  • Miller also voices Timo, a tenrec who is only seen attending Julien's meeting.
• Jeffrey Katzenberg as Rico, a smart and silent penguin who is only expressed through grunts and squeals.[6] Mireille Soria, the film's producer, commented on Katzenberg's uncredited role: "The irony for us is that he's the one who doesn't talk. There's something very Dadaistic about that, isn't there?"[6]
  • Katzenberg also voices Abner, a blue-eyed lemur who is only seen at the paradise scene.
• Christopher Knights as Private, an eager, lowly penguin.[6] Knights was also an assistant editor on the film.[6]
• Conrad Vernon as Mason, a chimpanzee (Phil, the other chimpanzee, is unvoiced).
• Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath as the fossa.
  • Darnell also voices Hector and Horst, two lemurs.
• David P. Smith as Pancho, a crowned lemur.
  • Smith also voices Becca, a black lemur and a spider.
• Elisa Gabrielli as Nana, an elderly German-accented New Yorker. Gabrielli provided some background voices until the directors and producer asked her and her fellow actors if they wanted to try their voices for the role. Upon seeing a black and white sketch of Nana, Gabrielli knew that she wanted to voice her. She modeled Nana's voice after her Russian and Hungarian grandmothers and her stepfather, though she didn't think that her voice would be kept in the finished film at first.[11]
• Bob Saget as an unspecified off-screen zoo animal.
• David Cowgill as a police horse.
• Stephen Apostolina as a police officer.

According to co-director Tom McGrath, the idea for Madagascar began as a one-sentence prompt, and it took two years of development for the idea to be refined to the point where the four main characters were finalized.[12] In 1998, DreamWorks and PDI had started development on an animated film titled Rockumentary, which featured a Beatles-esque penguin rock band. The idea was scrapped, but after production on Madagascar started, director Eric Darnell decided to revive the penguins, but make them a commando unit instead of a rock band.[12] In the original script Gloria was going to be pregnant due to being part of the zoo's breeding program and the baby was going to be born on the island and Melman, who is revealed to have a crush on Gloria would help raise the child like it was his own son. The idea was cut from the final version because the test audiences felt like the pregnancy plotline was too risky and mature for a family film especially young children who felt uncomfortable with the pairing of Melman and Gloria and may have gotten the film a PG-13 rating. However, the idea of Melman having a crush on Gloria was reused for the sequels. One of the lead characters was formerly to be an okapi. As a result, the character, Melman, was changed and played by a giraffe which is a more familiar animal. Originally, Julien was intended to be a minor character with only two lines. However, when Sacha Baron Cohen auditioned for the role, he improvised not only an Indian accent, but eight minutes of dialogue for his recording. The filmmakers found Cohen's performance so funny that they rewrote the script and made Julien a much more prominent character in the story as "King of the Lemurs".

Madagascar was released on DVD and VHS on November 15, 2005, by DreamWorks Home Entertainment.[13][14] The DVD included a short animated film The Madagascar Penguins in a Christmas Caper, and a music video "I Like to Move It," featuring characters from the film dancing to the song.[15][16] A Blu-ray version of the film was released on September 23, 2008.

The Madagascar - Movie Storybook was written by Billy Frolick and illustrated by Michael Koelsch, and was published by Scholastic in 2005.[17][18] Koelsch also illustrated the Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa - Movie Storybook in 2008.[19]

Madagascar is the soundtrack to the 2005 DreamWorks film of the same name. It was released by Geffen Records on May 24, 2005. Of particular critical note was the cover of "I Like to Move It" by Sacha Baron Cohen, which has since become a recurring theme song throughout the Madagascar franchise.

The score was composed by frequent DreamWorks collaborator Hans Zimmer, with additional music by James Dooley, Heitor Pereira, James S. Levine, and Ryeland Allison. Zimmer also adapted John Barry's instrumental from "Born Free" into the score track of the same name; The Mormon Tabernacle Choir's cover of the song was used in the opening title sequence. Originally, Harry Gregson-Williams, another frequent DreamWorks collaborator, was supposed to compose the film's score. Louis Armstrong's song What a Wonderful World is used in the film.

A sequel, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, was released in 2008, followed by Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted in 2012 and the spin-off film Penguins of Madagascar in 2014. The series has also spawned a number of television series, short films, video games, and other media, as well as theme park attractions and live stage shows.

The animated television series entitled Madagascar: A Little Wild was aired, streaming on Peacock in 2020.

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• Official Website Official Website archived from the original on June 12, 2005
• Madagascar at IMDb
• Madagascar at Rotten Tomatoes