Just saw a teaser trailer for the upcoming live-action/cgi Chipmunks feature. Excuse me while I blow my brains out in car...
Is there some way we can get the Geneva Convention to outlaw these god-awful, gag-(not the funny kind)-inducing grotesqueries? Garfield, Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties, Scooby-Doo, Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed...
They were all Oscar contenders (for Best Pic period, not just Best Animated) compared to this, this - eugggghhhhh, is the best I can describe it. It's not just that the sole gag in the trailer (an homage to Pink Flamingos?) revolves around Alvin eating one of Theodore's turds to convince Dave Seville (Jason 'uh-oh I picked a stinker this time' Lee) it was only a raisin; (I guess kid movie farts were just a gateway drug to flat-out coprophilia) it's not just that the 'munks are life-size in the sense of REAL LIFE-sized chipmunks, thus losing the characters' kid/adult size relationships and turning them into pettable pets; no, it's that....
They're so god-dammed CUTE! CUTE! CUTE! All that exquisitely rendered fur surrounding the CUTEST little button noses and biggest, CUTEST, cloying eyes you've ever seen that will make you want to claw your own out. Near the end of his life Chuck Jones was selling newly-drawn art prints of his WB characters; In these versions Bugs et. al. all had these excessively twinkly, winsome facial expressions that replaced their sass and jazz with a completely off-model (as Racketeer Rabbit's Rocky once said) 'adorable' quality that just wasn't the real deal.
Well, those pictures look like Guernica compared to this rendering of the 'munks. (Hey the 80's cartoon version of them was into movie parodies; they could do a take-off on Monk and replace Shaloub with Alvin!) Come 14 December if I can't find a video of the original 1960's 'munks - now that version was shiznit, or as Clyde Crashcup would've said, 'that's 'shiz' for shiz and 'nit' for niz' - I will be huddling under my bed, clutching pillows to my head, moaning 'make it go away mommy, make it go away, please!
Joe Strike has written about animation for numerous publications. He is the author of Furry Nation: The True Story of America's Most Misunderstood Subculture.
