Happy Feet

Happy Feet hit American theaters on November 17, 2006, directed — improbably — by George Miller, the Australian filmmaker behind Mad Max. Animated at Sydney's Animal Logic, the film told the story of Mumble, an emperor penguin born without a "heartsong" in a colony where singing is how you find your mate. What Mumble had instead was tap — and the film's secret weapon was that his dancing was real: tap legend Savion Glover performed every step in a motion-capture suit, his footwork translated frame by frame onto an animated penguin. Rendering all that ice and feather reportedly consumed 17 million CPU hours over nine months.

The voice cast was stacked — Elijah Wood as Mumble, Robin Williams in a triple shift as the Adélie penguin Ramon, the guru Lovelace, and the film's narrator, Brittany Murphy as Gloria, with Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman as Mumble's Elvis-and-Marilyn parents. Kids came for dancing penguins; parents got an eco-fable about overfishing that sent Mumble on a journey to find out where all the fish had gone. The mix worked: Happy Feet danced to $384 million worldwide, finishing among the top-grossing films of 2006.

Then came Oscar night. In only the sixth year of the Best Animated Feature category, Happy Feet beat both Monster House and the presumed favorite — Pixar's Cars — a genuine upset that remains a trivia-night staple. It also took the first-ever BAFTA for animated film. A 2011 sequel came and went, but the original endures as a very specific mid-2000s memory: the penguin craze era of March of the Penguins and Madagascar, distilled into one relentlessly catchy jukebox musical built on pop songs a generation of kids learned decades late without noticing.