MON MAY 9 05

		Madagascar-mania. Dreamworks is making an animated film set in Madagascar, leaving the country's "rough tourism industry" scrambling "to absorb a rush of the kind that Disney's "The Lion King" generated for Kenya, reports Michael M. Phillips in The Wall Street Journal (5/6/05). It's not that the expected tourism is unplanned -- in fact it is being carefully orchestrated by Conservation International, conservation.org, "an aggressive, well-connected environmental group" whose 4,000 donors fund its $120 million annual budget. Also in the mix is Jeffrey Katzenberg of Dreamworks, dreamworks.com, who has invested some "$500,000 of his own money to help ... promote ecotourism in Madagascar." Presumably, Mr. Katzenberg mainly hopes the film will be a hit, while Conservation International hopes the "planned ecotourism will bring jobs and money to the villages near the forests, giving the locals an incentive not to cut down the trees or eat the wildlife." Conservation International, whose board includes the likes of Wal-Mart's Rob Walton, Queen Noor of Jordan and Harrison Ford, hope this movie will also help "brand the real Madagascar as a paradise of mammals, reptiles, amphibians and birds found nowhere else in the world. Most famously, Madagascar is the only place that has true lemurs -- 69 species and subspecies of them -- 24 of which are endangered." Don't look for the movie to get into much of that, though: "If people are looking for some message about environmentalism, they ain't going to find it in this movie," says Mr. Katzenberg. "Environmentalism is not a pejorative word." In fact, the movie's production was already underway before CI found out about it. The decidedly whimsical storyline actually is about a lion, a zebra, a giraffe and a hippo who escape from New York's Central Park Zoo and somehow end up with the lemurs in Madagascar. "Madagascar is a magical name, that's why we picked it," says Mr. Katzenberg. "The word itself seems to be full of fantasy and promise of a place that's exotic and unique. And, lo and behold, it is." Truth is, the film's animators haven't even been to Madagascar -- they picked up what they needed to know about "the landscapes and wildlife" via "the internet, books and videos. The studio set the movie in Madagascar largely because it sounded wild compared to Central Park." So, will the movie turn Madagascar into the next Kenya? Helen Crowley, Madagascar director of the Wildlife Conservation Society has her doubts: "I think people will be intrigued by Madagascar ... Then, they'll go on the web and find out it's a long way away, costs $2,000 and has malaria ... I do wonder about the American market," she says. The film, madagascar-themovie.com, which features the voices of Ben Stiller and Chris Rock, opens May 27th. Tim Manners, editor