Movie:
The Happy Feet story resembles a bit the story of the little ugly duckling. With one big difference ... it's all about penguins this time !

Starting with the birth of Mumble (Elijah Wood), son of Norma Jean (Nicole Kidman) and Memphis (Hugh Jackman), this movie instantly shows that music is an important issue for penguins. Life-altering-important that is, since penguins find their partner ofr life throught their heart-song ... and that is exactly what Mumble seems to be missing out on.

You see, father Memphis had a little 'accident' while guarding the baby-egg, and now Mumble sings like utterly crap. Luckily he does seem to be a tapdancing genious, though he gets treated for this as an outcast by the community.

Being casted out of the community, Mumble leaves the love of his life Gloria (Brittany Murphy) and decides to find out who is stealing all the fish from the penguins ... and that is where the journey begins.
 
Sound and Vision:
It's hard to describe the visuals splashing from your screen when you are watching this HD-DVD release of an animation film. Why is it so hard ... because it's damn close near perfection.

Sure, Finding Nemo looks great on an upscaled DVD player, but the details in Happy Feet are unbelievable. The snow, the water, the penguins ... it's all there and it's all in full hd, making you feel good about your investment in state of the art video technology.

The only flaw I could detect was some aliasing on the penguin fur when the sun reflects on it. I'm not 100% sure that it's not a de-interlacing issue with my TV, this reviewer here is waiting on his new cables to arrive to test it out. But, aliasing problem or not, Happy Feet is still a beauty of a dvd-release.

Mucis ... surround ... all is well in Happy Feet land. Since the movie is greatly inspired by different musical genres, the sound tracks are a great opportunity (and excuse to the wife) to crank up that volume. Dialogues are sweet and balanced, action scenes are on the right level.
 
Extras:

Mumble Meets a Blue Whale

A Happy Feet Moment

Dance Like a Penguin: Stomp the Beat

2 Music Videos

Classic Cartoon: I Love to Singa

Theatrical Trailer

Some of the extras are in 1080p, some of them are in standard 480p. This sounds bad, but the producers have been very clever and are showing the 480 scenes in a smaller window on screen, giving the impressing you are still watching 'higher-def' material. Definitely a good choice, but I still don't get why they not simply film/encode everything in HD.
 
Conclusion:
Happy Feet is a must have for more than one reason. It's a great movie, has great music, great voice-acting, superb colors, near-perfect encoding ... bloody hell, can't think of one thing that isn't great about this animated flick !

That being said, it's a shame they didn't provide more value in the form of nice bonus content ... actually 'Mumble Meets a Blue Whale' and 'A Happy Feet Moment' are the only two nice extras.