Along with being a certified cinematic classic, and one of my personal favourite films, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? has become quite influential in how modern tentpole cinema is marketed nowadays. From Ready Player One to Ralph Breaks The Internet, right down to Avengers: Endgame, the big studios have been banking on productions that exist primarily for crossover potential between the different properties that they own. Except, while its position as an intercompany crossover is certainly part of the appeal (seeing Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse on-screen together still carries a certain childish thrill to it even today), Who Framed Roger Rabbit? was about much more than just the crossovers. Up to this point, it seemed like it would be one of many Hollywood successes where all the wrong lessons were taken as to why it was successful, just so modern studios can try (and repeatedly fail) to recapture that magic. Well, until this film, that is.
Like Roger Rabbit, Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers is built on the foundation of live-action humans and animated characters co-existing. However, it also reflects just how much diversification has taken place within the animation market in the decades since Roger Rabbit. 2D animation is represented (sometimes traditionally, but most of the time, it’s with cell-shaded 3D), but we also have stylized CGI along with the more photorealistic variety, stopmotion Claymation, ‘realistic’ motion-capture like Robert Zemeckis toyed around with in the mid-to-late 2000s, even puppetry, both of the Muppet variety as well as regular sock puppets. Even for how eclectic modern animation has been getting from the likes of Dreamworks, this really goes all-out to incorporate everything it can into its visual style.
To that end, what director Akiva Schaffer and writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand (who also worked on 2020’s Dolittle, but with how much rewrites that film went through, I doubt they carry much blame for how it ultimately turned out) say about all those different flavours of animation is at once cheeky and kind of horrifying. On the surface, it says a lot about how all these animated reboots bank on “updating” the visuals to fit whatever the current trend is, with characters going through so many face-lifts that, after a while, they barely even resemble the characters that were worth rebooting in the first place. And when that’s applied to characters that co-exist with human beings (i.e. have the same sentience as humans), all that shapeshifting takes on a kid-friendly body horror dimension, with a main plot point of animated characters being surgically altered so that they can be shipped off to be in dodgy overseas bootlegs of the genuine article. The kind of stuff you’d see from Dingo Pictures and Video Brinquedo; truly, a fate worse than Dip.
Where these sorts of productions usually take on a purely rose-tinted approach to the idea of nostalgia (as in the main reason why they’d bring back all of these familiar faces), this is a lot more pessimistic about the idea. We’re basically swimming through the detritus of animation past, from MC Skat Kat, to the numerous different iterations of the Disney canon, right down to Sonic The Hedgehog (the now-notorious original CGI design MPC whipped up for the first movie) being a key character in this film. Rather than feeling like these are all being presented just for basic “hey, I get that reference” notoriety, this seems to be aimed more at cringe, where that realisation is shifted to “hey, I get that reference… why do I get this?”
It basically approaches animation of all stripes the same way Schaffer and co-star Andy Samberg approached hip-hop with The Lonely Island, and the shots fired at the tropes and cliches of the format ring just as true across the board. There’s admittedly still some Emmanuel Goldstein energy to all this, just like with any film production that takes the piss out of other products owned by the same studio (making bank off of critiques of your own product is pretty much peak capitalism), but with the very fluid pacing here and the quick-fire delivery of the jokes, it doesn’t allow enough time for those kinds of worries to surface for too long. John Mulaney and Samberg as Chip and Dale are terrific together, as are the rest of the cast, from Eric Bana as Monterey Jack, J.K. Simmons as the stopmotion Captain Putty, Seth Rogen as a resident of the Uncanny Valley, and even Tim Robinson as the beta-build of Sonic.
And I haven’t even gotten into this film’s connection to the original show… which is mainly because I don’t have any real knowledge of it going into this. As I’ve likely said in past reviews, a lot of my animation diet as a kid came from Cartoon Network, and while there was some Disney work in there like Recess, I’m not as familiar with the golden age of The Disney Afternoon. Thankfully, though, that proved to be far less of a problem than I initially feared. There’s some callbacks to the show here, and some of them are quite intrinsically tied to the main plot, but with the meta-sequel take they’re going with here, it’s easy enough to get into it without doing the homework. For a modern Disney film, that on its own is a minor miracle, but kudos also for how the film actually modernises the original mystery-solving conceit, with some genuinely clever plot developments and real thought being put into the clues behind the mystery itself.
The end result of all this is a highly entertaining feature that openly pokes and prods at the modern animation market (and not just Disney either; Dreamworks, Warner Bros., and even Nickelodeon get their share of ribbing as well), and highlights some very real problems with the attitudes studios have when making animated films… while also showing sizeable respect for all properties involved, creating a sense of empathy between the audience and the characters that have gone through so many mandated changes in look and function. It’s an animated film that makes the audience care about the animation, both as industrial process and as the act of creating personalities, and that’s about as close to the Roger Rabbit ideal as you can get.
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