Some happy that a family film flaunts dire facts

WASHINGTON -- Michael Hirshfield has long struggled to get across his earnest but wonky message: that global warming and overfishing are killing off the oceans' food supply.

Then, along came the animated movie "Happy Feet" and, voila, tens of millions of youngsters -- and their parents -- across the country are suddenly aware that man-made problems are threatening the penguins near the South Pole, and almost everything else in the South Seas.

The blockbuster film, the top box-office hit for the past three weekends, is about emperor penguins struggling to survive with a depleted food supply, and one tap-dancing penguin's epic search to learn what is causing the colony's fish to disappear.

"It's huge to be able to start a conversation that doesn't have to go into a boring, scientific food-web explanation, and just say, 'You know, like 'Happy Feet,' " said Hirshfield, the Washington-based chief scientist at Oceana, an ocean protection advocacy group. "And everyone will get it."

"Happy Feet" took environmental groups by surprise. The film studio, Warner Bros., gave them no tip-off about its environmental message. Now, advocates are trying to figure out how to capitalize on the movie.

At the New England Aquarium, which has 65 penguins -- including the rock hopper, the same species as Lovelace , a key character in the film -- children are peppering guides with questions about penguin behavior. And environmental groups are rushing to craft messages on how youngsters can help the penguins, amid hope that questions being asked by children will soon become political concerns for their parents.

The film is projected to take in $180 million to $190 million in the United States alone, about eight times the figure for the much-discussed Al Gore documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth." Environmentalists say "Happy Feet" provides a rare chance to spread their messages on global warming, overfishing, and the dangers of oil spills to an audience that doesn't usually follow public policy.

"The generation that will be seeing this movie, the children, will be the ones facing the critical issues when the big problems are going to happen -- possible global fish extinction in 40 to 50 years" for many species, said Matt Rand, director of the marine fish campaign at National Environmental Trust, a Washington-based advocacy group.

A study published recently in the journal Science predicted that if overfishing of depleted seafood populations continued at current rates, the world would run out of commercial stocks by 2048.

Wayne Z. Trivelpiece , who has researched penguins for 30 years at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration , said in an interview yesterday that all species in the South Seas are touched by the effects of global warming.

Penguins and some large sea animals survive on the shrimp like krill, which themselves feast on algae embedded in the northern edges of the Antarctic ice. But increases in temperature in the last three decades have caused the ice to melt away at its northern edges, forcing penguins to move south and causing supplies of krill to diminish. In the historically rich krill-breeding grounds, ice is now appearing, on average, only one winter in five.

That, said Trivelpiece, has led to sharply reduced numbers of krill. Huge trawlers from Norway, Russia, Japan, Korea, Ukraine, and Poland, among other countries, also have been catching an average 100,000 tons of krill in recent years , for feeding farmed salmon and for pharmaceutical uses . With the increasingly depleted stocks, the commercial catch is becoming more of a threat to the survival of krill. Environmentalists want not only to reduce the trawlers' catch, but also to force them to fish in a wider area.

Researchers have found that when young Adelie and chinstrap penguins in Antarctica venture out on their own, usually every March, fewer than half now survive because of the reduction in krill populations, he said.

"When they go out for first time with no parental oversight, with the krill population reduced, the probability of returning has declined radically," Trivelpiece said.

He and other scientists wish the movie had focused less on overfishing and more on global warming, but he added: " Anything that raises the consciousness of what goes on in the Antarctic is important. The Antarctic is sickly and deserves to be in the forefront of people's minds."

Conservationists don't harbor notions that the movie will immediately create a pro-environment mindset among the very young. They acknowledge that the movie's soundtrack and the penguins' personalities are the major draws for most moviegoers.

Trivelpiece took his two daughters, ages 9 and 14, to the movie last weekend, and they were more moved by the music than the message. While both have been to Antarctica and are "pretty savvy about this stuff, they liked the music and the dancing more than anything else."

And at the Boston aquarium, many children in the last two weeks have asked lots of questions about the penguins, including which species they are and why they aren't living on ice like the birds in the movie. (The answer is that the three species of penguins at the aquarium are from temperate zones in the southern hemisphere, where they live on land and don't eat krill.)

But few aquarium visitors so far seem worried about the penguins' chances of survival.

"The kids ask if our penguins dance a lot," said Justin Boepple , 25, visitor education specialist at New England Aquarium, which for two weeks has featured a program titled "Walk Like a Penguin." "I tell them they don't dance, but say that the rock hoppers hop some."

For more information on penguins, see the New England Aquarium's Web presentation, www.neaq.org/penguins.

John Donnelly can be reached at donnelly@globe.com