Happy Feet is a 2006 computer-animated jukebox musical comedy film directed, produced, and co-written by George Miller, and was produced at Sydney-based visual effects and animation studio Animal Logic for Warner Bros. Pictures, Village Roadshow Pictures, and Kingdom Feature Productions. It was released in North American theaters on November 17, 2006, and in Australian theaters on December 26, 2006. It is the first animated film produced by Kennedy Miller and Animal Logic. Set in the cold land of Antarctica, the film follows Mumble, an emperor penguin who, despite his lacking the ability to sing the heartsong to attract a soul mate, is able to tap dance brilliantly. After being continuously ridiculed and rejected by peers and his own father, Mumble departs on a journey to learn what is causing the local fish population to decline--and to find himself along the way.
Although the film ends with the entire Emperor penguin colony engaging in dance in front of the research team, whose expedition footage prompts a worldwide debate, which eventually leads to the banning of all Antarctic overfishing, satisfying both the emperor penguins and the Amigos, the original ending is rumored by an anonymous person to have been bitter and much darker. The ending is rumored to have took place at the forbidden shore scene after the orca attack. The scene is said by an anonymous person to have featured Mumble evading poachers on the fishing boat, and, while attempting to swim away in the water, got fatally shot in the heart by one of the hunters, fading to black. It was then reported that the next scene fades in from black to show Mumble's smiling head before zooming out and revealing his decapitated head on a hunter's trophy wall in the kitchen, before fading to black one last time and the end credits rolled in.
It is unknown on what happened to the rumored alternate ending of Happy Feet, but it is thought that, when the ending was shown to the test audience, it received extreme criticism for how dark and traumatizing it was to some of the children watching the ending; it was likely, therefore, cut and completely removed from existence by one of the animators and the ending was reworked to be happier. It is unlikely that the ending will ever see the light of day, but the anonymous person who sent in the screenshot is rumored to also have a complete alternate ending in the files.