There is a sign that a movie exists in that sort of middle, lukewarm territory that is just below average but not enough to be offensive. Yes, I struggled to stay awake during Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers.
There’s nothing necessarily terrible about the movie. It’s fine. It’s no Roger Rabbit, though, and if you were hoping for a human world meets cartoon world hybrid that comes close to the eighties classic, this ain’t it. I can understand why they changed the voices for the two protagonists — it may have been hard to sit through more than an hour of high-pitched squeaks — but the only reason for the poor animation has to be money. Rather than doing traditional hand-drawn images, everything here goes through a computer and uses a 3D image with cell-shading to approximate a cartoon look. It doesn’t work. It especially doesn’t work with mouth movements. And it especially especially doesn’t work in that the animators never use any sort of rubberbanding or exaggerated movements. All the cartoon characters lack their cartoony nature because they’re all stuck with the exact same physics as the real world.
Maybe that’s why it’s so weird when they travel to the Uncanny Valley. The movie wants to laugh at films that missed the mark with computer graphics… while at the same time it is also missing the mark with computer graphics. Maybe that’s why they brought in Ugly Sonic: it makes even Dale’s off-putting design more palatable.
You know what's crazy about this cameo? Aside from Disney's lawyers able to get the negotiations to make this cameo happen, the animation studio MPC who did the Sonic+Sonic 2 also worked on Chip N Dale and were actually able to dig up the original Ugly Sonic Model for the movie https://t.co/qcJ2bendtr
— HMK (@HMKilla) May 20, 2022
The story here is not impressive either. As an example, there’s a part of the movie that is supposed to be high intensity with lives at stake. The only problem is that the movie requires the chipmunks to step off of the place they are currently located to a new location in order to be put through a gauntlet of danger. Rather than having that occur in some understandable way, the chipmunks literally just jump into the dangerous place they should not be. It’s indicative of the problems this film features. Essentially, it’s not that the writing is bad per se, it’s that it’s half-hearted and lazy. In other words, whoever wrote the script knew what they were doing, they just phoned it in while they were doing so.
On the flip side, the original voice actors who actually were brought back do a fantastic job with what they’re given. That’s a nice touch even if it’s never fully utilized. It would have been somewhat fun to have the Rescue Rangers all come together at some point in the movie to defeat the bad guy. Unfortunately that doesn’t happen and the villain is defeated by a live action character who also isn’t necessarily all that believable. Peter Pan, after all, cannot be the villain in this movie: he’s just too sad a character to be anything more than the victim. After all, he’s the only cartoon that ages with no reason provided, which is about what you’d expect from this little “adventure.”
So what to say of the Rescue Rangers?
Much like other offerings on Disney+, this just sort of exists. What more can one say about a film that makes no real point, has no significant moral, never really offends, but also never really makes you care. It’s just there. Maybe it’s more fodder for seven year olds who won’t understand the connection in the movie between “stinky cheese” and drugs. I don’t know. But even then, I just can’t see this being a repeat viewing for anybody.
Grade: 4/10 “Meh”
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