There are few stranger curricula vitae in the movie business than the one compiled by the Australian director George Miller. In the late Seventies and Eighties, he was the auteur of the apocalypse, helming the three Mad Max movies that helped make Mel Gibson a star. Then he briefly segued into the adult mainstream, helming The Witches of Eastwick and then Lorenzo’s Oil, before retreating, disillusioned, back Down Under and reemerging as an auteur of children’s cinema — first with the beloved Babe and its critically praised though little-seen sequel, Babe: Pig in the City, and then the two Happy Feet penguin epics, the first of which actually won him an Oscar, in 2007, for best animated film.
I wonder very much how many of the parents relaxing alongside their kids at Happy Feet 2 realized that this was the same filmmaker who had once sent Gibson’s Max Rockatansky careering across a post-catastrophe Outback, chased by mohawked goons on motorbikes, taking down grotesques with such names as Master Blaster and Lord Humungus.
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