“Happy Feet” dominated the Thanksgiving box-office, easily beating “Casino Royale” for the second time and outpacing the new crop of pictures by a considerable percentage.Gross over the holiday: $51.5 million. Cumulative: $100.1 mil.

Holy flippered crap.

I was sure word-of-mouth would kill it. Critical response has been wildly mixed. At the Sunday morning sneak I attended, small children were alternately bored and wailing; their parents were puzzled — to say the least — by the story’s darker turns. And the ending is a freakshow.

But people are going. Maybe its mushy message — about being yourself, even if that self is a tap-dancing penguin who gets exiled from his troop and reinvents himself as a kind of misfit messiah, ultimately saving the waterfowl of the Antarctic through the magic of dance — is genuinely connecting with audiences. Or maybe it’s just surfing the aggregate buzz from “March of the Penguins” and “An Inconvenient Truth”.

Beats the hell out of me. But even if I can’t understand what people see in his movie, I can still be very happy for George Miller. He’s told the story he wanted to tell, and somehow convinced a thousand or so CG artists to realize his vision. That kind of artistic will deserves to be celebrated.

Even if it’s being celebrated by penguins singing Queen at the top of their lungs.