Mumble (voiced by E.G. Daily) out for a stroll.

Director/producer George Miller is a man with two main moviemaking modes: dystopian actioners and family favorites. The man behind both Babe, the talking pig, and road warrior Mad Max, is hewing to the kid-movie mode of his expertise with the all-star (Robin William, Elijah Wood, Nicole Kidman), feel-good, singing-and-dancing penguin 'toon Happy Feet.

PREMIERE: There has already been March of the Penguins and Farce of the Penguins. Next year Sony's releasing Surf's Up. Clearly the penguin is having its moment in Hollywood. What drew you to it?

GEORGE MILLER: The camping and survival technology got to the point where documentary crews could winter over with the penguins. So some great documentaries started to come out probably over the last ten to fifteen years. I saw Life in the Freezer about ten years ago and I thought, "Oh my God, I knew about the penguins but I had no idea that there lives were so extraordinary."

How did you conceive the storyline for Mumble, the dancing-but-not-singing penguin forced out of the flock?

Mumble (voiced by Elijah Wood) breaks out into a wail in Happy Feet.

Life in the Freezer made me think [about] the way they live collectively. The way individuals relate to the community is quite extraordinary. They cannot survive in the immensity of that landscape without the community. In particular, when I saw how they find their mate through song, I thought, "there is a great story to be told here." It's an allegory about us as human[s]. We have always used stories about animals to shine the light on ourselves from a different angle. And so one thing led to another. [The first thought was to have] one penguin who can't sing who goes to a remedial teacher and finds out that he can dance. And suddenly it was singing and dancing penguins.

You have directed dramas, documentaries, and comedies but this is your first animated film and I hear your crew were new to it as well.

Well, I had a taste of it with the Babe movies, even though it really was just the faces that were animated then. In this case, everything was animated. We used motion capture for the dancing. We did it in Australia because I live in Sydney. I was also very inspired by what Peter Jackson, Richard Taylor, and Fran Walsh were able to do at WETA. I visited them [on the Lord of the Rings set] a couple of times and just saw the technology was and it encouraged me that we could do this film in that part of the world even though the talent came from all over. It felt like the United Nations. We had animators and lighting people and computer guys from everywhere: from China, from India, from all over America, Canada, England, Europe, Italy, Africa, even Iran.

How did the cast come together?

Norma Jean and Memphis (voiced by Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, respectively) bring up baby Mumble.

We had worked a lot with Nicole Kidman and she ended up doing the film without even reading the script. I was looking for someone who could sing and I knew only too well from the Broadway shows that Hugh Jackman had done that he could sing.

Were any cast member's talents a revelation? I don't think many people anticipated Brittany Murphy singing.

I saw an audition of her singing. I think she trained as a singer before she even became an actor. I never thought she could pull off "Someone to Love" by Freddy Mercury but she did great on it.

There's plenty a new song from Prince in the movie. How did you manage to get him to write that?

The film begins with Nicole Kidman singing "Kiss." Because she's singing a male song, we wanted to chance the word "girl" to "pearl" and Prince said, "No, I don't change my lyrics." [We] said, "If you saw the movie, you'd see how it's appropriate. He said, "Show [me] the movie." So they showed him the movie and just as it was finishing, he picked up his guitar and started to strum chords and said, "Give me two weeks. I'm going to write a song for it. I don't want any money." I was very touched. He wrote a wonderful song for it which is very responsive to the movie that he saw. I think he was the first person to see the movie complete.