This Chemical X thing is one powerful element. Not only does it transform what is basically a recipe for gingerbread into three super-powered little girls (immediately able to walk, talk, and think), but its mere proximity super-evolves a chimpanzee’s brain. And yet kindly Professor Utonium remains strangely unchanged, unless you consider that it may have altered him into a nervous Nellie that makes the average new mother look positively uncaring.
It also seems poised to lure hundreds of thousands of children screaming into movie theaters this weekend, then out to malls to buy Powerpuff Girls products. And yet, at its heart, The Powerpuff Girls Movie is a far less cynical exercise than most of the big movies bombarding us this summer.
Telling the heretofore untold story of how the girls and their greatest archenemy Mojo Jojo came to be, the movie has all the hallmarks that have made the television show a success. I’ll admit, however, that the girls themselves have always failed to charm me, though most of their enemies make me laugh in theory.
Indeed, the first half of the movie has a strange drag to it. It’s paced with a lot of long pauses and stares in a quasi-anime style, though most of its target audience will not get the joke. And most of the sequences quickly become repetitive, especially a long game of tag that pretty much destroys the city of Townsville. Some of it seems designed just to show off a slightly higher budget for animation effects, though the character work seems just as blissfully static as on television.
Once Mojo Jojo enters the picture, however, things really start to take off, if only because of the utter lunacy of his environment. (And he makes for a nifty opening sequence, too, as a simple monkey wreaking havoc in Utonium’s lab.) With the girls’ help, the evil simian builds a secret headquarters atop a volcano in the center of town. And nobody seems to notice. By golly, these people deserve to be subjugated by a super-intelligent monkey.
His master plan goes predictably awry, but director Craig McCracken lets his imagination go so wild with it that the audience can’t take issue with the obviousness of the plot. Let us just say that McCracken remembers a cardinal rule: monkeys are funny. So hundreds of monkeys must be exponentially funny. Many writer/directors might bobble this premise, but McCracken succeeds, making for a very funny final third.
Technically, the animation really isn’t much of a step above the series, and for some reason, the whole mood seems a little dingy. That could be the fault of the theater I saw the print shown at, but even the television commercials reflect this. (And those are hard to avoid when you spend a couple of hours watching random bits of The Iron Giant marathon.)
Cartoon Network also helps revive a staple of movie-going: the cartoon short subject, with a Dexter’s Laboratory episode entitled “Chicken Scratch.” The mad boy genius gets a case of chicken pox and has no idea what they are.
Ten seconds into the cartoon, a little girl behind me whispered to her brother, “this is the best one EVER!” Who am I to argue with such criticism? If you’re a fan of Cartoon Network, especially the work of McCracken and Genndy Tartovsky, then put this on the top of your list this weekend. And if you get dragged to it by kids or weird friends, you’ll still find it pretty likeable. Oddly enough, it may be the best of this week’s releases.
