The Birthday

In New York City, a lion named Alex lives in the Central Park Zoo as a star attraction known as the "King of New York" with his best friends, a zebra named Marty, a giraffe named Melman, and a hippopotamus named Gloria. Marty, having grown tired of his daily life in the zoo, desires to experience the wild. One evening on Marty's tenth birthday, Alex, Melman and Gloria attempt to cheer him up, but he remains unsatisfied. Having learned earlier that the zoo's four penguin spies, Skipper, Kowalski, Rico and Private, are trying to escape to Antarctica, Marty decides to follow them out of the zoo to fulfill his wish to be in the wild. Marty heads towards the Grand Central Terminal to catch a train to nearby Connecticut. Alex, Melman and Gloria discover Marty's absence and pursue him, joined by the penguins and chimpanzee duo Mason and Phil at Grand Central, where an army of officers subdue them. Under pressure from animal rights activists, the zoo is forced to ship the escaped animals by sea to a nature reserve in Kenya. During the trip, the penguins manage to escape their crate and hijack the ship, setting course to Antarctica, inadvertently causing the crates carrying Alex and his friends to fall overboard. Upon being washed ashore on the East African island of Madagascar, the quartet come across its lemur inhabitants, led by a ring-tailed lemur named King Julien XIII. The predatory fossa attack the lemurs, but are scared off by Alex's fearsome appearance. Feeling homesick, Alex angrily blames Marty for the group's predicament, and makes several attempts to be rescued, with no success. Marty finds life in Madagascar to be exactly what he wanted, with Gloria and Melman soon joining him. Without the raw steaks Alex was provided at the Central Park Zoo, his hunger sets in, triggering his predatory instincts. The next morning, King Julien and the lemurs attempt to befriend the castaways in hopes that Alex's presence will keep the fossa at bay, despite protest about Alex's predatory nature from his adviser, Maurice the aye-aye. While entertaining the lemurs, Alex starts to hallucinate everyone as steaks, briefly loses his sanity and attempts to eat them, scaring them all. Alex flees to the fossa territory of the island to protect his friends from himself. Seeing what Alex has become, and how dangerous the wild can be, Marty regrets his decision of leaving the zoo. Having found Antarctica to be inhospitable, the penguins decide to land the ship at Madagascar. Seeing the chance to finally return home to New York City, Marty tracks Alex's trail towards the fossas' territory where he tries to convince his friend of the ship's arrival, but Alex refuses out of fear, still not wanting to hurt anyone. However, Marty refuses to leave without him too, and starts singing to cheer him up. When Marty is suddenly ambushed by the fossas, Gloria, Melman, and the penguins come to the rescue, but they are far outnumbered. Alex, having overcome his predatory instincts, arrives and rescues his friends, scaring the fossas away from the lemur territory permanently. The penguins satisfy Alex's hunger by feeding him sushi, which he finds better than steak. As the lemurs throw a farewell celebration for the group, the penguins decide not to tell them that the ship has run out of fuel, leaving them stranded on the island for the time being.