Scientists agree that half of our world is made up of elementary particles known as fermions and the other half is made up of advertising for “Happy Feet.” Fermions are useful and necessary; “Happy Feet” is neither so the question becomes: Is it any good? Has every flat surface in the free world been covered with “Happy Feet” billboards because it’s a terrible movie and the studio wants to make boffo bucks on opening weekend before heading for the hills, or because it’s a modern day classic that Warner Brothers knows every man, woman, and child should see at least once?

George Miller, the director of “Babe” and “The Road Warrior,” has been hunkered down in Australia for the last four years hammering raw vectors and gigabits into “Happy Feet.”The result of being so far outside Hollywood is that this flick has become the first piece of outsider art in the history of computer animated kids films. Since “Toy Story” in 1995, these movies have grossed billions and become rule-bound corpses that deliver great advances in texture mapping but serve up the same old story (“Believe in yourself!”) in the same old way. This year’s offerings — “Over the Hedge,” “Ice Age 2,” “The Ant Bully,” “Monster House,” “Cars,” “The Wild,” “Open Season,” and “Barnyard” — are all essentially the same movie with their polygons rearranged.

But “Happy Feet” capitalizes on the appeal of singing penguins, first discovered in “The Sound of Music,” to take audiences from the familiar to the fraught. It’s an extension of Mr. Miller’s “Babe: Pig in the City,” with the darkness and danger turned up to 11. Mumble (a composite character with Elijah Wood on voice, Savion Glover dancing, E.G. Daily doing additional vocal work, and Matt Lee for motion capture acting) is a penguin who can’t sing. Penguins, apparently, have FM radios in their heads and spend all their time crooning Prince medleys and Beach Boys mashups that facilitate mating. Mumble can only tap dance, so he’s ostracized by his colony, rejected by the girl he loves (Brittany Murphy), and falls in with a bunch of Latino penguins who live on the wrong side of the glacier.

Things get strange when Mumble embraces his inner tap dancer and returns to his colony, where religious hysteria has taken root thanks to a famine. Mumble and his “foreign friends” form a Fellowship of the Flipper and embark on a quest to Mordor — I mean, the Forbidden Shore — to save their ecosystem.

Along the way they run into the Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin (posthumously playing an elephant seal), see the United Nations in action, and watch Mumble go crazy (and not the “ha ha” kind of crazy but the sad, pathetic, “I’ve lost my mind, please help me” kind of crazy).

Mr. Miller is a director, not an animator, so stick your head into “Happy Feet” for five minutes and you’ll pull it out full of “The Jazz Singer,” “Triumph of the Will,” “Gold Diggers of 1939,” “The Road Warrior,” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” The colors are natural grays, whites, and browns, which are relaxingly beautiful after seeing animated films smear the screen with sticky-looking purples and pinks (“Barnyard,” I’m looking at you). The computer isn’t treated like a camera, giving it free reign to execute complex tracking shots that soar, spin, and swoop for extended periods of time before coming up for air.

“Happy Feet” is extremely crass, but also extremely moving. It’s a piece of junk, but it’s junk we haven’t been served before. There’s too much movement, too many characters, too much going on, too much sadness, too much weirdness, too much action, too much singing, too much dancing. But sometimes it’s nice for once to get more than enough, rather than nothing much at all.