Review - All Hail King Julien - Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer

Fans of DreamWorks' animated Madagascar franchise will have to wait until 2018 for next fourth feature film, but in the meantime they look forward to seeing five brand-new episodes from DreamWorks Animation's Netflix original series All Hail King Julien that will premiere on April 3rd.

Set prior to the original Madagascar film, All Hail King Julien centers on the selfish, party-loving ring-tailed lemur named King Julien XIII (voiced by Danny Jacobs), whom doesn't take the leadership of a kingdom very seriously. Even his big-boned Aye Aye adviser Maurice (voiced by Kevin Michael Richardson) and his new bodyguard Clover (voiced by India de Beaufort) can't stop his crazy antics.

These five new episodes are:

Eat Pray Love
He Blinded Me With Science
Viva Mort
The Really Really Big Lie
One More Cup

This upcoming batch of episodes features an exciting new character - Timo (voiced by David Krumholtz), a hedgehog that becomes King Julien's tech-guy. He must try to fix the Kings boombox that seemed to be broken just as the King was to perform a dance. An anti-King Julien group, LALA (Lemurs Alliance Liberation Army) easily persuades the kindhearted Mort (voiced by Andy Richter) into joining their group. Later, after a bag of coffee beans is found, King Julien has Timo to create a coffee machine; resulting in the entire kingdom getting hooked on caffeine.

King Julien ponders advice from his royal advisers, Maurice (left) and Clover, a new character who handles royal intelligence and special ops for King Julien’s court. Photo: DreamWorks Animation All Hail King Julien © 2014 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Out of all the character to spinoff to off from the Madagascar films, I would have never thought of featuring King Julien in his own series as I found the character a bit annoying in the films. Danny Jacobs steps in to voice King Julien (Sacha Baron Cohen voices the characters in the films). The animation quality for each 23-minute episode is topnotch, similar in style to the movies. While the character is still a bit annoying, the scripts are written pretty good, blending in crazy humorous plots with a few action scenes here and there. My favorite out of the three episodes that I screened is the 10th episode One More Cup, where the entire kingdom gets addicted to coffee. Overall, All Hail King Julien is surprisingly entertaining series that both children and parents will enjoy watching together.