½*/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras C-
screenplay by David N. Weiss & J. David Stem
directed by Norton Virgien & Igor Kovalyov
by Bill Chambers Demographically challenged, I nonetheless looked forward to spinning The Rugrats Movie DVD because:
- Animation looks great on the format
- I had time to kill
- The Rugrats Movie made a lot of money at the box office–gotta keep my finger on the pulse of the nation
Stop me if I ever make this the criteria for watching a movie again. 1) The DVD of The Rugrats Movie may look beautiful from a technical standpoint, but the film's animation proper does not. 2) Time–nay, life–is too precious. 3) If box office were any correlative to worth, the movie business would be a very different one indeed. For what it's worth, the only blurb stamped on The Rugrats Movie's packaging is from the Film Advisory Board, Inc.; in my experience, films that come pre-approved by some committee as being suitable for "the entire family" tend to have sinister qualities, like politicians approved by the Star Chamber.
In the interest of full disclosure, I fell asleep during the climax of The Rugrats Movie, something that hasn't happened to me at home since Wrestling Ernest Hemingway. (That's a movie–I've never had the opportunity to wrestle Ernest Hemingway.) Although The Rugrats Movie soars at a breakneck pace, it's tedious as hell. The film is an hour-and-a-half of peepee jokes and fart noises and vomiting; you feel like you're watching a documentary about fraternities.
Having only a vague familiarity with the TV show, I was caught off-guard by the unrelenting ugliness of the title characters' design. They have disgusting, cottage-cheese heads and some form of scoliosis that makes their butts stick out. The lead rugrat, Tommy, wears only a baby tee and a lumpy "diapie" throughout the film, yet he can speak in fully-formed sentences. He's clearly the smartest of this bunch, so why is he dressed like this? His father lectures him about responsibility: How about pointing that wisdom at himself and buying his maturing son a goddamn pair of pants?! What's worse, Tommy has no teeth, and they draw his gummy smiles. It's cute when a real baby has no molars, but a cartoon character with flappy, fleshy gums is Kricfalusi territory.
To summarize The Rugrats Movie's plot, I quoth thee the liner notes:
With the birth of his new baby brother Dylan, Tommy Pickles knew things were about to change, but he never expected that being a big brother could be such an adventure. While attempting to return little Dil to the 'hopsical,' the Rugrats commandeer the Reptar Wagon and inadvertently get lost in the forest.
Regrettably, these are not the same woods where Fargo's Gaer Grimsrud is hiding out. Oh, to feed these kids to a woodchipper.
The Rugrats Movie is a noisy, classless affair. It caters to a generation children who can't even sit through a commercial for The Rugrats Movie. The camera is constantly moving, and the multi-plane techniques lend some scenes an astounding depth of field, but all this stylishness is gratuitous flash that isn't so much catering to short attention spans as cultivating them. As I see it, incidentally, the Rugrats do not teach real children any valuable lesson in their first big-screen outing–or if they did it, went over my "big people" head.
A few jokes are futilely thrown an adult's way but feel pasted in, synthetic. I am fondly remembering the original Muppet movies, which got away with a sophisticated sensibility because the sheer amount of fuzzy-animal eye-candy meant kids were already covered. A car chase in The Muppet Movie features the following priceless exchange:
Kermit the Frog: "Bear left."
Fozzie Bear: "What?"
Kermit the Frog: "Bear left."
Fozzie Bear: "Right frog!"
A runaway wagon in The Rugrats Movie sees baby Dyl puking on his babysitters. Even Howie Mandel is cringing.
THE DVD
Paramount's DVD presentation of The Rugrats Movie is stunning, however. Without a doubt, if you must subject yourself to this 81-minute torture, this is the way to do it. The RSDL offers non-anamorphic widescreen and standard versions without having to flip. An AB comparison revealed a significant increase in side information on the letterboxed edition. The consensus among studios is that children prefer full-frame to black bars, but take my word for it: genuine rugrats don't notice and don't care. Pan-and-scan is for whiny adults. The 1.78:1 image boasts an outstanding level of detail despite the lack of 16×9 enhancement. (Because the film is so short, a generally high bitrate was employed in the compression.) Contrast and colours are immaculate, and fine detail holds up nicely in the dark (or is that darkly-painted?) night sequences.
The audio on this disc is good, too. The split surrounds are quite active; the film features a number of impressive panning effects, particularly when the Reptar is negotiating its way through the busy street. The terrible songs were recorded well, for the most part (I despised that bastardization of Blondie's "One Way or Another," but it's the best-sounding tune), although the monkey's "Oo ee ah ah ah"–or however one spells it–comes across curiously flat. What are chimps doing in the woods just outside of suburban America, anyway? The 5.1 track does miss several opportunities for booming bass, with only a truck and a rolling ball in the not-exactly-timely Indiana Jones prologue causing the subwoofer to rumble. (Incidentally, said rolling ball hints at what a 5.1 remaster of Raiders of the Lost Ark might sound like, which is to say, awesome!)
There are a few extras on this DVD, primarily a mildly amusing short entitled Cat Dog–Winslow's Documentary, featuring an animal that is a cat at one end and a dog at the other. (Location of genitalia unknown.) This "doc" is presented in 2-channel stereo; after watching The Rugrats Movie, that aspect of it is a bit disappointing–you'll need to crank the volume. Additionally, there's the expected trailer for The Rugrats Movie. I was surprised that Nickelodeon didn't pressure Paramount to spruce up the menus: Kids love CD-ROM-style clickable interfaces, and not animating the access interface is a missed opportunity.
81 minutes; G; 1.78:1, 1.33:1; English DD 5.1, English Dolby Surround, French Dolby Surround; CC; DVD-9; Region One; Paramount
