-By Frank Lovece

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An improvement on the 2005 original, this sequel involving an animated lion and his friends nonetheless makes one appreciate anew the magnificence of The Lion King (1994). On its own sitcom-y level, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa is often funny; though not a classic for the ages, it offers a good time for a couple of hours. What's the difference? An adult couple could attend The Lion King in movie theatres and have an emotionally rich and deeply affecting experience. This flick you really kind of need to see with a kid, and most of it would be out of one's brain by bedtime.

That said, like a good episode of a TV comedy, this is a fine enough diversion. Its vocal performers never slack, giving it their all as if they were spinning gold, and their gusto and commitment are contagious. Ben Stiller, as the showbizzy Central Park Zoo lion Alex—who with his friends Marty the zebra (Chris Rock), Gloria the hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith) and Melman the giraffe (David Schwimmer) tried to take a vacation in the last film and ended up stranded on the African island-state of Madagascar before now winding up on the continent—plays the same sort of clueless performer off the stage and in real life as he does in Tropic Thunder, with no less dedication to creating a fully fleshed-out character whom you care about despite his self-involved eccentricities. So, too, does Schwimmer go beyond the cliché hypochondriac of the previous film to make Melman a wounded, lonely soul who, when the pressure is on, ennobles himself in a perfectly logical, in-character way.

So what makes this all so throwaway compared to something like The Lion King? (And don't blame us for making the comparison when the filmmakers made Alex a prodigal prince, his father a lion king, and his father's rival not the real Scar but an incredible simulation.) That would be the easy, simplistic life-lessons; the setup/punch-line structure in lieu of humor arising from the characters’ (anthropomorphic) humanity and foibles; and the slapsticky caricatures that are the supporting characters.

On an immediate level of good, dumb fun for kids, though, the film hits its highlight with a caper scene by the first movie's breakout characters, the quartet of delusional, military-like, precision-team penguins led by Skipper (co-writer/director Tom McGrath). Their crack execution of a plan to steal jeeps from unsuspecting photo-safari tourists on the animal preserve in which the film takes place is a small masterpiece of timing, invention and pure visual deftness that takes full advantage of the possibilities of animation.

Some story points don't hold together: The Lion King addressed the fact that the lions eat the zebras, though here all the animals live together in a Babar-like tranquility that makes you wonder if the lions are vegetarian. And there's an oddly dissonant sexual-fetish vibe—the flamboyant, cross-dressing lemur-king making jokes about his "nuts," Skipper's love affair with essentially a sex doll, and his checking out two monkeys' genitalia to ascertain they're males, for instance—that is so ingrained that one TV commercial for the movie plays up those very things to make this children's movie seem like some 1960s Broadway sex farce. On the other hand, you can never go wrong with jokes about New Jersey and Yonkers.