No Rescue

That famous gang of rodent detectives sort of returned in 2022's Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers. The nostalgia value of the old Disney afternoon series has been leveraged to lend interest to a banal, meta-humour, cgi caper.

Of the many bad creative decisions in the film, the most prominent is to make Chip and Dale sound like normal adult human men, now voiced by John Mulaney and Andy Samberg. They don't really feel at all like the same characters, especially coupled with the weak animation for Chip.

Flat colour cgi stands in for traditional hand drawn animation and doubtless there are people who worked on this movie who don't believe the two styles look significantly different. Dale, in the logic of the world the film inhabits, has had "cgi surgery" to stay up to date and looks decent enough, even if his voice is wrong.

Apparently the film is supposed to exist in the same universe as Who Framed Roger Rabbit in which Toons and humans live side by side. But the cheaper gags here are at the expense of a verisimilitude that Roger Rabbit maintained. Chip and Dale wearing rat noses to infiltrate a spa easily make it through the door because the idea that they would is funny, logic be damned. And the film does have some funny moments--I particularly liked the running gag about "ugly Sonic". But anyone looking for the sincerity of the original series will be disappointed.

Of course, the show was itself derivative of The Rescuers but it had some incredible animation and genuinely memorable characters. I still think Monterrey Jack is an ingenious name for an adventuring mouse. Monterrey Jack is voiced by Eric Bana in the film, I guess because now it's politically incorrect for an American actor to do an Australian accent? In any case, he sounds identical to Jim Cummings' original performance--and Cummings is still in the film as various other characters. So why Disney would pay for a star of Bana's stature is a little mysterious. I can't imagine there are many die hard Eric Bana fans who are checking this movie out just for him.

The film's villain is a surprisingly tasteless lampoon of Disney's Peter Pan. He's portrayed as an embittered former child star whose opportunities in Hollywood dried up as he grew older. Were the filmmakers aware of the fact that Peter Pan's original voice, Bobby Driscoll, suffered a similar career trajectory? It's a grim joke, if so, since Driscoll was found dead in 1968 after having lived homeless for some time. His body wasn't identified for a couple years and he was buried in an unmarked grave in New York's Potter's Field. So we're supposed to laugh at him now?

Anyway, for many reasons, Chip 'N Dale: Rescue Rangers is a lousy, soulless film. It's available on Disney+.

Twitter Sonnet #1592

A glowing nose was turning red for Yule.
Another script was writ for office lunch.
Let's carry hay above the stronger mule.
The monkey punctured your banana bunch.
Lamented steaks appeared beyond the dream.
In giant creatures thoughts become a world.
A single brain became a razor team.
Prophetic fish are just the kind to curl.
The chips were flies or mice to break the car.
With flying bottle ships they stopped the beat.
Illicit wishes dropped the simple star.
A question posed to truth regarded meat.
The severed ear returned to grace the monk.
Computer storms hath many gadgets sunk.