Saturday, Jul 19, 2008
Robert De Niro's whip-fast Fearless Leader blurs the line between humans and cartoons, but the rest of this clunky TV remake is stiffer than an iron curtain.
Jun 30, 2000 |
"The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle"
Directed by Des McAnuff
Starring Rocket J. Squirrel (voice of June Foray), Bullwinkle J. Moose (voice of Keith Scott), Robert De Niro, Jason Alexander and Rene Russo
If you're a fan of the original animated series "The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle," the first five minutes of the new feature-length film are just what you'd hoped they would be. In an animated prologue we learn that since Rocky and Bullwinkle were canceled in 1964, their hometown of Frostbite Falls, Minn., has fallen into rack and ruin. Our heroes are subsisting on ever-diminishing residuals. Things don't look much better across the sea, where the fall of the iron curtain has put the kibosh on the world-domination schemes of Fearless Leader and his agents, Boris and Natasha.
The animated sequence at the start of the film recaptures the look of the original TV episodes, a mishmash of lines and loops where everything looks like it was designed by a cockeyed architect. It's welcoming and familiar, but also sharply funny and fresh. You settle right into the tone of wiseacre humor as if the show were returning after a summer hiatus instead of after 36 years.
And then the movie starts.
Jay Ward's "Rocky and Bullwinkle" (which ran from 1961 to 1964) satirized Cold War paranoia, rah-rah patriotic spirit and the general idiocy of mass culture, all in the form of a Saturday afternoon serial -- one cliffhanger guaranteed per episode. Rocky was the true-hearted American hero, recast as a flying rodent with a high, scratchy voice. But the show's fans loved his moose sidekick, Bullwinkle, a galumphing boob with a voice that bounced as if a Ping-Pong ball was caught between his vocal cords and his epiglottis. The show congratulated its viewers on being smart enough to pick up the references strewn throughout (such as Bullwinkle emerging from the movies to boast, "Hey, Rock, I can imitate that guy. 'Stella! STEL-LA!!'"), but it was never smug. The heart of the humor lay in the tortured puns, the parodies of heroic exploits and the characters' breaking the action of the show to directly address the audience.
The trouble with the new film begins right with the conception: Fearless Leader finds a way to bring himself, Boris and Natasha into the three-dimensional world (where they are played, respectively, by Robert De Niro, Jason Alexander and Rene Russo) and commence plans for taking over the world. He plans to do it by broadcasting a cable station that will turn Americans into "mindless zombies incapable of independent thought," thus making them putty when he puts himself forward as a presidential candidate. The FBI summons Rocky and Bullwinkle into the world (where they are 3-D computer-generated models) to foil F.L.'s plans.
With a few exceptions -- "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" and the recent "Stuart Little" -- I've never seen a mix of live action and animation that didn't look clumsy and disassociated, as if the actors and the animated characters were communicating via shortwave radio in a hurricane. That's part of the problem here. Another is that the physics of cartoon humor simply don't translate to live action. Rocky and Bullwinkle seem a tad too cute in their computer incarnations. They're stranded in a real world, and so are the actors. When Boris' trademark hat flies off his head as Fearless Leader chews him out, or when Boris and Natasha sit suspended in midair before crashing to the ground, the jokes thud to earth with them.
A cartoon explosion has a lighter touch than a real explosion, and "Rocky and Bullwinkle" feels, for such a silly comedy, both heavy and slow. Humans can't react with the speed of cartoon characters, so the material loses the rat-a-tat-tat deadpan that set the tone of the TV series. (I guess there was no studio interest in making a full-length animated movie, though the five-minute prologue suggests there was both the will and the wit to make it a success.)
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