Marty the Zebra (Chris Rock) dreams of one day leaving the Central Park Zoo and exploring "the wild". Then on his tenth birthday, the penguins - the psychotic penguins, I should say - dig a hole into his cage, leaving him the perfect opportunity to escape (assuming he can fit his zebra body through the small penguin-sized hole).
That night, Melman the Giraffe (David Schwimmer) notices that Marty is missing, and he convinces Alex the Lion (Ben Stiller) and Gloria the Hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith) to go looking for him.
None of them seem able to fit down the hole, so Gloria crashes through the wall and they head for Grand Central Terminal - figuring Marty will take the train to wherever he is headed. Sure enough, that's where they find him. No word on how they get through the turnstiles. But before long, they are surrounded by police, and the penguins, who also managed to escape, are caught too.
All of the animals are crated up and loaded onto a ship bound for Kenya. But those penguins, never content to sit still, ask the monkeys to translate what it says on the outside of the crate, and seeing that they are going to Kenya, take matters into their own hands - literally. They hijack the ship and turn it towards Antarctica. But when they do this, it sends Alex, Gloria, Marty and Melman overboard.
Not long after this, they wash up on the beach of an island, and think they have arrived at the new home. When they aren't greeted, they go looking for their new handlers, but are greeted only by wildlife and find that they have landed on Madagascar. About then, Alex gets hungry and starts deciding he needs meat - especially Marty's hindquarters.
The rest of the movie is spent with the four city-fied creatures trying to figure out how to live on their own, but before long, the penguins return, having decided that the temperature of Antarctica wasn't to their liking. They're going to stay in Madagascar instead. The others are free to take the ship where they like (but it's out of gas). There is no sign of the monkeys.
Rated PG for mild language, crude humor and some thematic elements.
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