Two Penguin Movies. One Winner.

Hollywood is a strange business.

Every so often, completely different studios seem to decide at roughly the same time that what audiences really need is the exact same thing.

Volcano movies. Asteroid movies. Movies about the White House getting attacked.

Hollywood loves a good dogpile.

And apparently, for a few months there, the subject was penguins.

Two movies came along about men who form unlikely friendships with penguins: My Penguin Friend with Jean Reno and The Penguin Lessons with Steve Coogan.

The strange part isn’t that Hollywood somehow gave us two penguin movies at almost the same time.

The strange part is that both of them are worth watching.

My Penguin Friend

Of the two, My Penguin Friend was my favorite.

Jean Reno plays João, a Brazilian fisherman who finds a penguin washed ashore, covered in oil and barely alive. He takes the bird home, cleans him up, nurses him back to health and eventually releases him back into the ocean.

Normally, that’s where the story ends.

Not with this penguin.

He finds his way back to João, and what follows is an unlikely friendship between a man who has withdrawn from much of the world and a bird that apparently has no intention of letting him stay that way.

The best part is that the basic story actually happened.

That matters because My Penguin Friend could very easily feel like somebody sat down and tried to manufacture the perfect heartwarming family movie.

Instead, knowing there really was a fisherman and a penguin that kept coming back makes the whole thing work considerably better than it probably should.

Then There’s The Penguin Lessons

The Penguin Lessons starts with almost the same elevator pitch—man meets penguin—but becomes a very different movie.

Steve Coogan plays Tom Michell, an English teacher working at a boarding school in Argentina during the 1970s. While traveling, he comes across a penguin covered in oil, rescues it and soon discovers that getting a penguin out of your life is considerably more difficult than getting one into it.

That sounds very close to My Penguin Friend.

It isn’t.

Coogan brings his usual dry humor, and The Penguin Lessons has more going on around the edges. The political situation in Argentina matters. The school matters. The people Tom meets matter.

The penguin becomes less the entire point of the movie and more the thing that starts pulling this detached guy into the lives of the people around him.

It’s funnier than My Penguin Friend, a little more eccentric and probably a little less emotionally direct.

I still preferred the Jean Reno movie.

But not by enough that I’d tell you to skip this one.

Two Penguins, Two Very Different Movies

My Penguin Friend is the warmer, simpler movie. It leans into the relationship between João and the penguin and lets that carry almost everything else.

The Penguin Lessons is more of a comedy-drama about a man being dragged back into the world around him, with the penguin acting as a wonderfully strange catalyst.

If you like animal movies, true stories or just smaller movies built around people you actually enjoy spending time with, I’d recommend both.

Start with My Penguin Friend.

And if that doesn’t completely scratch your penguin itch, Hollywood has you covered.