Was reminded of this by a friend and so I decided to kick off my four day weekend with it. I originally saw this film at Sixforks Theater in Raleigh, NC when I was seven years old. Sixforks was less than a year old at the time and with six screens represented the encroachment of the future. Here comes the multiplex!
When my family would go see a movie in Raleigh we would usually stop at the “Movie Theater McDonald’s”. It was a McDonald’s built in a renovated movie theater that still bursted with neon inside and out and had a marquee to advertise bullshit like the McDLT. My young brain couldn’t process why there was a MickeyD’s that looked like a theater but I liked it. I found out today when looking for pictures of it that before it was the movie theater McDonald’s it was an adult movie theater and that a southern city experiencing a rightward cultural swing cheered the move to Big Macs from “big sausage pizza.” Turns out Sixforks also closed but was reopened as Triangle Cinemas because the Research Triangle has settled into being a hotbed of historic theater preservation. Who knew?
Anyway, these fucking Chipmunks. The Chipmunk Adventure makes no goddamn sense. Klaus and Claudia Furchstein need to smuggle five million dollars in diamonds to various locations around the world. BTW, if you want incest energy they have you covered. So these BILLIONAIRE DIAMOND SMUGGLERS are sitting in what looks to be a bullshit malt shop and they see Alvin and Brittany playing an elaborate ass arcade game about traversing the world in a hot air balloon race. A fine set-up for an ambitious 80s quarter muncher.
So the Furchsteins create the appearance of a wager in order get the Chipmunks and Chipettes to act as diamond mules. The Chipmunks and Chipettes are told the winning will get $100,000. That’s 286.5K adjusted for inflation. An outrageous amount of money for a kid, let alone an anthropomorphic chipmunk who wears clothes. But these little shits aren’t in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World, Cannonball Run or even Rat Race.
They’re in a Bob Hope/Bing Crosby Road To movie. Hope and Crosby’s Road pictures required them to be unwitting pawns in criminal or political machinations. Just a couple of assholes that don’t realize they’re in danger until the third act. Invariably, they get into it because of their rivalry which is mapped onto Alvin and Brittany here.
The Chipmunk Adventure builds the meat of the characters’ adventure on a cavalcade of broad, ugly cultural stereotypes. One indigenous culture is shown to immediately worship Theodore once they see him but they plan to sacrifice him later. The Chipettes are derailed in generic Arabic stereotype land where a smart alec, pre-pubescent prince dresses the girls in harem outfits and declares he will make Brittany “one” of his wives in ten years. Virtually every musical interlude sounds like it was written by someone’s drunk racist uncle after he sees a tourism ad on TV. Henchmen are glowering foreign menace types who exist only to serve the sibling fuckers.
By the time Road to Hong Kong came out in 1962 the series has abandoned all grounding in reality. It was break neck, over-the-top, illogical and a mechanism for delivering song and dance and exoticizing depictions of global locations.
25 years later along come The Chipmunks to sing I, Yi, Yi, Yi about Mexico. The financial absurdity here would never be clear to a starry eyed seven year old but building and maintaining a fake Mayan pyramid complete with pressure plate and doll exchange system is gonna cost more than the five million they are trying to smuggle.
What the fuck conditions led the film to being this mess? I’ll say this, for all the cultural insensitivity of the film the animation pops in every frame. It’s lush and decadent. When The Black Cauldron flopped in 1985 Disney cleaned house. They were in a tenuous financial position and looking to assign blame wherever they could. The Black Cauldron dismissals would go onto staff many major American animation studios over the next decade but in the immediate moment producer Ross Bagdasarian was hiring.
Modern animation was moving toward a visual economy that was more spare in its design but the animation leads here had all been trained by Disney’s Nine Old Men so OF COURSE the Furchsteins look like Cruella de Vil’s spiritual siblings. Gorgeous but dated animation.
The film was a mess with the original director quitting two months into production. Ross Bagdasarian’s wife Janice Karman replaced the director. When she, never having directed before, stepped in she was pregnant and didn’t yet know it.
The ex-Disney animators imposed a house style that was beyond the scope of the animators leading Badasarian to staff up from global studios to hit their release week.
So what’s the deal with a movie built with 1930s animation techniques, 1940s cultural sensibility, a stiff dry writing style from 1950s television and 1980s pop music? Is it a horrible Frankenstein? Yes but I love it.
It represents the vanity of couple trying to prove themselves after over the family business (yes, Alvin and the Chipmunks was a family business). It’s the wide eyed naïveté of first time filmmakers. It’s an altar of professional admiration for old school animation. It’s all the ugliness of American imperialism and 1980s greed is good wrapped up in singing, smuggling Chipmunks.
I am seven, my feet dangling inches above the ground in a sparkling new six screen multiplex with the house lights dimming. I’m 46, knees aching, scratching my beard as I piece together animation trivia and the ephemera of memory. Perhaps nostalgia’s not so dangerous when view the forgotten world with open eyes.