Disney’s Chip and Dale have been around since 1943, the stars of dozens of shorts through the company’s Golden Age of animation, often cast as mischievous foils to Donald Duck or Pluto. And yet even to many Disney fans most of that history has been forgotten since the pair were rebooted as adventure heroes for basic cable television in the late 1980s. Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers was one of the headline shows of what was called the Disney Afternoon, a programming block of Disney cartoons in the early 90s that have attained a cult reverence due to nostalgia (me personally, I was about a half-generation out from this -my equivalent was One Saturday Morning). Indeed the Disney Afternoon was perhaps the company’s first real successful capitalization on nostalgia -and its’ interpretations of several classic characters have become their standard recognized forms, the whole cast of DuckTales being another example. So there’s something poetic in Chip ‘n Dale resurfacing in the age of nostalgic reboots, and through a movie that in just about every frame is powered by nostalgic reference. The 1940s cartoon characters repackaged for the 90s to be exploited in the 2020s.
As you can imagine there is no acknowledgement to Chip and Dale’s existence prior to Rescue Rangers in this movie, directed by Akiva Schaffer of The Lonely Island, who produced the film. It’s origin story in fact sees the chipmunks as children in a very modern elementary school, who yet came into adulthood in the 80s in time to launch that very show -despite its’ real world setting it has no interest in real world consistency. Of course the world of this movie is essentially that of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the clearest influence at work. This is especially palpable in the plot, which casts Chip and Dale (voiced respectively by John Mulaney and Andy Samberg) as actors who have drifted apart in the years since their show, now getting involved in a mystery concerning the disappearance of cartoon characters -and what is ultimately becoming their fate is essentially just an update on that earlier movies’ “Dip”. The biggest difference from Roger Rabbit, is the high levels of meta-text humour and references that fill out the movie -many related to notions of reboots and satirizing elements of Disney’s brand and animation itself.
This is a project that tests the limits of Disney’s willing self-deprecation, and as would be assumed it is enough to raise an eyebrow but never goes too far. For example, while it pokes fun at reboot culture in terms of it being expected and pervasive, it makes sure to never actually critique such a thing, a Rescue Rangers reboot being ultimately framed as an unequivocal good. Similarly, the CGI animation on Dale, a seeming comment on vapid animation homogeneity equated with plastic surgery, is never addressed as such. The movie wants you to consider it a cheap upgrade, but still an upgrade -and I wonder if the terrible 2D animation is an enforcement of this.
Most of the main 2D animated characters look exceptionally stale, with hard limits to their expressiveness, little to no texture, and incapable of fluid motion within a live-action atmosphere -the dialogue almost never lines up with the mouth movements, it’s like something out of a second-rate 2000s video game. Characters like Chip, Monterey Jack, and especially Gadget where she appears have no tangibility (something Roger Rabbit had in spades), and it’s funny that the movie will make fun of the vacant expressions of Robert Zemeckis-style motion-capture animation while being just as lifeless in the 2D format. And yes, Zemeckis monstrosities do show up in this, as well as a ton of other animation styles, all of which look better -from a Gumby-like stop-motion cop voiced by J.K. Simmons to a Muppet voiced by Keegan-Michael Key to a couple genuine cel-animated figures.
Of course a lot of these entities are easter eggs, though such obvious ones that the term hardly applies. The film is very intent on you noticing not merely the Disney cameos, but those from other animated properties that through legal shenanigans managed to make their way in. Nickelodeon mascots appear, a bunch of My Little Pony’s, and even a character from South Park (notably absent: any character owned by Warner Bros.); though the strangest one is a rejected version of a major I.P. voiced by Tim Robinson that is both one of the funniest things in the movie and perhaps the most striking example of its’ shamelessness. Consigning most of these to the backgrounds and sporadically through the movie saves it from the onslaught of obnoxiousness of Space Jam: A New Legacy -but it still can’t escape that air of boastfulness on Disney’s part. They’re clearly proud of putting every animated character Seth Rogen has voiced in the same space -even if almost nobody remembers at least one of them. The smallest degree of restraint and smart or funny usages of such devices by a good creative team doesn’t make it any less a callous show of power.
And it’s a power that allows Disney to acquiesce to some subversion of the brand, to craft the illusion of creator control in the case of Schaffer and the Lonely Island. It’s a PG movie but it often threatens to cross that line, yet another nostalgic kids’ property not aimed at kids so much as millennial adults who might remember the cartoon. It is still guided by childrens’ movie themes however, in the tired tension to the relationship between Chip and Dale, once the closest of friends, being the biggest character thread. Not much original comment is wrung out of its’ cynical though sanitized portrait of Hollywood, both in the entertainment world and the gritty underground scene, apart from the novelty of it concerning cartoon characters, some of whom are known Disney quantities. Flounder from The Little Mermaid makes an appearance at the catalyst of a central plot involving bootleg characters (in another way the movie subtly extols the Disney brand) that is a shockingly blunt metaphor for sex trafficking -orchestrated by chief villain Sweet Pete (Will Arnett), who is a grown-up, washed-up Peter Pan, in by far the movie’s darkest, arguably most tasteless joke (look up the story of Bobby Driscoll for context). But for the dark undertones, all of it is fundamentally shallow -like a multi-million dollar company trying to replicate Robot Chicken. There’s the hint of desperation as Disney is out of its depths with this kind of tonal aesthetic. And they’ve never been very good or genuine at making fun of themselves.
Where they’re not necessarily trying to do that, the movie can be funny -the Lonely Island has always had a sharp wit about them and a love for surreal humour that does have an outlet here. And John Mulaney and Andy Samberg work well. Some of the nostalgia gags do land and the movie is much more self-aware than other mega-crossovers are -even as it lampshades its’ conventions way too much to point it acts as an excuse for the often poor writing. One notable human character is featured, a fangirl cop played by KiKi Layne, who is not terribly believable as either of those things, but at least Paul Rudd shows up in a bizarre though reliably charming cameo.
There’s some character to Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers, provided mostly by artists given a modicum of leeway, but it is still not very impressive, especially when it’s trying to be. Even at its’ most intrepid or unexpected (usually to do with those other company cameos), it’s merely nifty before turning slightly depressing. I think it says a lot that Disney chose to make Chip ‘n Dale into this rather than a more straightforward adventure movie adaptation of the cartoon -an indication of where their priorities are in this age of content consolidation. Even a few good laughs don’t take away from that hollowness.
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