ALTHOUGH Happy Feet started in George Miller's imagination long before the documentary March Of The Penguins, it plays like a fabulously choreographed animated remake, with echoes of Singin' In The Rain. Singin' In The Blizzard, perhaps.

Miller has picked up on the fact emperor penguins have the unerring ability to distinguish each other amid 25,000 other birds by a distinctive squawk, known as a 'heartsong'. Happy Feet tells the story of Mumble (Elijah Wood) who pops out of an egg hatched by his Elvis-like dad (Hugh Jackman) and torchsinging mom (Nicole Kidman) . . .

to their horror . . . unable to sing a bar in tune, turning out instead to be a natural tap dancer. "What if he's a little different?" says mom, bravely. Dad is mortified and the flock shun him, all except Gloria, a penguin with a divine voice he adores from afar.

Much like A Bug's Life, Mumble sets off to prove his worth and find the 'aliens' who are depleting the fish stock and causing the ice cap to shrink, teaming up with a troupe of mambo-loving Latino penguins lead by Ramon (Robin Williams). All of which has aroused fury among US religious fundamentalists who have denounced Happy Feet as a corrupting influence for its "eulogising" of cultural difference and "covert" propagation of the anti-global warming message of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.

George Miller draws freely on the repertoire of contemporary cinema, evoking Moulin Rouge in the way Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman sing Prince's 'Kiss' while Robin Williams belts out Sinatra's 'My Way' in Spanish.

Mumble's eventual contact with humans echoes Close Encounters Of The Third Kind in reverse.

I suspect a lot of this may be above the heads of children but the breathtaking animation of the awesome polar landscape and particularly a monstrous elephant seal (voiced by the late Steve Irwin) will keep them riveted to their seats.

Requiem (Hans-Christian Schmidt): Sandra Hueller, Stefan Weiser.Running time: 92 mins . . . .

The Exorcist never seemed to me to be anything more than fairground cinema, mainly because it relied on garish effects. Requiem is different, as it tackles the same real-life 1976 events depicted so sensationally in The Exorcism Of Emily Rose . . . in which a young German Catholic student died of malnourishment after a series of exorcisms. HansChristian Schmidt avoids shock effects to provide a Ken Loachlike study of the psychological dilemma of an independentminded epileptic girl trapped in a repressive rural Bavarian community with a mother who regards her as a 'tramp' because she goes to college. When she suffers a recurrence of her fits and starts hearing satanic voices, the family hand her over to priests where she fights a losing battle with her obsessions. While Schmidt leaves the issue of actual demonic possession open, Sandra Hueller's restrained performance is harrowing in its human immediacy.