Member review

Marty the Zebra is a dreamer. He lives in New York’s Central Park Zoo, where his every need is catered to, but he longs to run free in the wilds of Africa, where—well, Marty has no real idea of what living in the wild entails. It just sounds fun. His good friends Alex the Lion, Melman the Giraffe and Gloria the Hippo try to convince him how good they have it at the zoo—all the food they want, the attention of their adoring fans, nothing to do but lie around all day.

Marty remains unconvinced, so he decides to blow the joint and escape to the wide-open spaces of ... Connecticut. (It’s easier to get to than Africa since there’s a direct train from Grand Central Station.) He gets some help from a passel of psychotic penguins, who are determined to return to their ancestral home in the wilds of Antarctica. When Marty’s zoo pals decide to rescue him from his folly, they all wind up on the wrong side of the animal control officer. Next thing they know, they’ve been crated up and are aboard a ship headed for a wildlife preserve in Kenya.

That’s when the penguins decide to hijack the ship. The hijacking goes awry, however, and Marty, Alex, Melman and Gloria find themselves adrift at sea. They soon fetch up in the wilds of Madagascar, where they meet a colony of critters led by a lemur king and get to learn what it really means to be a “wild” animal.