Here comes another Disney “classic” rebooted. An old, beloved Mouse House property shoved into a one-hundred-minute feature with explosions and bigger budgets and celebrity voice talent. After seeing works like “The Lion King” and “Beauty and the Beast” brought back, the next to be cranked out of Disney’s pipeline is “Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers. While it might be a typical Disney live-action/animated hybrid reboot on the surface, this is a film that is fighting tooth and nail to be considered anything but a cheap, high resolution cash cow.
Chip, voiced by John Mulaney (“Big Mouth,” “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”), and Dale, voiced by Andy Samburg (“Palm Springs,” “Brooklyn Nine-Nine”), are decades long best friends and also washed-up actors. Like arguably the best non-Disney Disney film, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”, “Rescue Rangers” is set in a world where animated characters and humans coexist. This is a twisted world full of properties like “Batman versus E.T.”, where Main Street hides deviousness under its surface, and cartoon characters go missing every other week.
Of course, this means it's up to the titular duo to figure out some way to work together and crack the case. While it’s certainly spiced up with some creative twists, the main “goal” of the antagonist is so delightfully weird that it won’t be spoiled here, the overall plot is a fairly basic noir-adjacent film tale. There are double crosses, clues, secrets, it's all standard fare for the genre, but it's helped thanks to the generally silly and happy go lucky tone of the entire adventure.
That silly tone, as refreshing as it is, is where some people are likely going to be lost. You definitely have to be on The Lonely Island wavelength for this, and it’ll appeal the most to fans of director/band member Akiva Schaffer’s (“Hot Rod,” “PopStar: Never Stop Never Stopping”) previous works. How Disney let the man who directed “Dick in a Box” or “Motherlover” run wild with not only their IP, but that of virtually every other studio in the business is a caper likely more exciting than the one in the film itself. But he clearly takes the job seriously, and the film is shot like a real noir. It might seem like faint praise, but for a film that could have easily looked really cheap and just slapped onto Disney+, there are a lot of fun filmmaking touches here. From just well shot sequences and camera angles, to some heavy film grain and even a handful of shots clearly paying tribute to Michael Bay, it's a film that has clear effort put into it.
While it might not be fair to compare it to “Roger Rabbit” in terms of creativity, they both share one major similarity: their celebrations of animation as a medium. Where “Roger” was a big celebration of traditional animation, “Rescue Rangers” features claymation, hand drawn animation, CGI, puppetry, motion capture, and likely more that go unnoticed on a first viewing. It all looks great, blending together without sacrificing one style in favor of another.
There is one tiny nitpick though: about 99% of the hand drawn characters are actually two-dimensional animation. However, for Chip, the other Rangers, and the antagonist, they’re made using a cel-shaded CGI to make them look two-dimensional despite clearly being 3D. It doesn’t always work, and in some moments they just look weird. But, it's a tiny blemish on an otherwise insanely ambitious animated achievement. It’s just a delightful playground that never takes itself too seriously.
The fact that it doesn’t is a huge boon to the general sense of fun the adventure has. Writers Dan Gregor (“How I Met Your Mother,” “Dolittle”) and Doug Mand (“How I Met Your Mother,” “Dolittle”) don’t feel like they’re taking anyone to task. Rather, it's all good-natured ribbing and fun poking that the whole family can laugh at. While it does have a PG rating and is clearly trying to appeal to those kids raised on works like “The LEGO Movie,” “Rescue Rangers” might actually have its perfect audience in millennials. Not just those who grew up with the original show, but really anyone who’s a bit tired of the trend of Hot Topic “retro” cartoon t-shirts or the parade of “Only 90’s kids remember” memes on Facebook.
Mulaney and Samburg have some great chemistry, and the two are no strangers to voice acting work. There isn’t really a lot of emotional drama to work with here, given the silliness of the tone, but the pair play off each other excellently. They slot right into the kind of archetypes that the original characters filled, and they make for just a fun, lovable pair. The supporting cast is rounded out with some really great performances from the likes of Will Arnett (“Bojack Horseman,” “Arrested Development”), Kiki Layne (“If Beale Street Could Talk,” “The Old Guard”), J.K. Simmons (“Whiplash,” “Juno”), Seth Rogen (“Knocked Up,” “Sausage Party”), Eric Bana (“The Finest Hours,” “Star Trek (2009)”), and Keegan-Michael Key (“Keanu,” “Schimgadoon!”). These smaller roles are, like the background gags, arguably more fun than the main focus, mostly because it becomes a fun game of seeing who signed on to voice a character clearly making fun of themselves.
That’s honestly the best way to approach this new “Rescue Rangers.” It is not even remotely a reboot of the original material, instead playing as a surprisingly clever Hollywood satire that pokes fun at everything 90’s kids have grown to love and despise about modern Tinseltown in equal measure. It’s voiced really well and the various animation and character stylings all blend fantastically. The story might be a bit typical for anyone who’s seen a handful of buddy cop or noir movies, but the sense of silliness and the reverence for animation as a medium helps to salvage that. “Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers” is easily the weirdest blockbuster since something like “The LEGO Batman Movie” and as the credits roll: “How did Disney let them do this?” 4/5
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