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More people hating on Foodfight is always good.
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Jul 28, 2014 00:43
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PROLOGUE: i am dying forever Foodfight! haunts me. If you have any interest in bad film, and particularly bad animation, I suspect you’ll have heard of Foodfight! I learned of the film’s existence through critic Nathan Rabin’s “My World of Flops” column for the Onion AVClub, which is as good an introduction as any. Briefly: Foodfight! was conceived in 1999 as a particularly devious perversion of Toy Story’s model. Every kid wonders if maybe, just maybe, their toys come to life and have adventures when they’re not looking… well, kids, how about the supermarket? What if, at night when the store closed, all of the mascots came to life and the aisles transformed into a bustling city? No child has ever wondered this ever.  The idea was to team up with companies and well-known (I hesitate to use the word ‘beloved’ – does anyone ‘love’ Charlie Tuna? Or the Vlasic Pickles Stork?) well-known mascot characters. In theory, this is a brilliant tactic for marketing synergy. As with Toy Story’s Barbie and Mr. Potato Head, the filmmakers would bring in various established advertising characters for cameos to drive up interest; by allowing the use of their mascots, the corporations involved would get free publicity; and, just like Woody and Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story, this film would launch a cast of new, lovable characters ready to be licensed.  In practice the film’s premise is so blatant and so odious I doubt even Pixar could make work. It advertises itself with advertising characters who are advertising unrelated products and new characters intended for advertising. This is serious hall of mirrors poo poo.  Mercifully, the children of America were never exposed to an enchanting Pixar-quality celebration of brand loyalty. The film was originally scheduled for a 2002 release. But that year the animators’ hard drives were allegedly stolen, forcing the release to be pushed back to 2005 as the production started over from scratch. The film finally received limited release overseas and on DVD in 2012. Its budget was 65 million dollars. The saga of Foodfight! is perhaps best demonstrated by a pair of New York Times articles. The first is from 2004, and describes the film in its earliest stages of development. The article is effectively a press release, bland and shockingly nonjudgmental as the filmmakers explain their monstrous work. A few quotes: quote:“… a clever script, some Hollywood heavyweights, high-powered technology and a widely, even globally, known cast…” quote:“Mr. Kasanoff insists that ‘Foodfight!’ will not be one long product commercial. To guard against that charge, the product-based characters will play a lesser role than Threshold's creations and do not overtly promote the packaged goods they represent. quote:“Amy Donges, a Procter & Gamble marketing specialist supervising that company's interest in the film, said that it might cross-promote the movie on some product labels but that no specific marketing budget has been formulated yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81uIhu8qrrs We can get a sense of what the filmmakers were attempting with this early trailer, which seems to predate the loss of the hard drives. It looks… okay. Good enough, especially for the early ‘zeroes. The style is clean, painterly. The figures are clear and animate well. Chester Cheetah shows up. This version of the movie could conceivably have been a success. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uROQ9nplxIY This is what was released. This second New York Times article, which makes the first seem hilariously naïve, seems a decent retrospective of exactly what went wrong.  There are multiple circles in Bad Movie Hell. There are movies that are Just Not Quite Good. There are movies that are So Bad They’re Dull, that are competently made, and although you won't be entertained at least you don’t feel embarrassed for the filmmakers. There are qualitatively worse movies that become unintentional comedies, So Bad They’re Good, and I’m sure we all have a couple of favorites from this category. And below that, I’d argue, there are movies that are So Bad They’re Fascinating; films so intricately awful, so complex and coherent in their badness, that the meta-narrative of the filmmakers’ intent and the cultural context that made the film possible become more engaging than the film itself. Bee Movie, at least as dissected by Pick, falls into this category. There is something below this. There is a level of badness… let’s call it So Bad They’re Deadening. (I put some thought into that designation – other options included ‘Numbing,’ ‘Stupefying,’ or some variation of ‘Nihilism-Inspiring.’) These are works so deeply incoherently awful that they barely register as stories, more just a sequence of sentences said by characters and images that move. Everyone involved in the production was at best totally apathetic and at worst totally deranged, and this is evident in every aspect of the film. You aren’t offended, you aren’t entertained, you aren’t amused, you aren’t bored. You’re just sort of… vaguely repulsed, and a little sad that something like this exists.  There is nothing good in Foodfight! The previous breakdowns in this thread did an admirable job of pointing out good work in the midst of a terrible product; effective visuals, rare funny jokes or accidentally sympathetic characters. Foodfight! has none of these things. I’ve seen the film multiple times, I’ve deliberately gone in looking for stuff that works, and there just isn’t anything. It is hideous. The script is alternately lazy, asinine, incoherent and inane. The cast is (understandably) totally disinterested. It is racist, sexist and homophobic. Its morals are reprehensible. Its production was a farce, and even the film’s basic premise is toxic. There is nothing.  And yet Foodfight! continues to fascinate me with the sheer depths of its incompetence. Every time I see this film I am again stunned by how every element of the story, every single second of film, is so totally devoid of quality. It is as if it were made by aliens who had heard about “jokes” and “characters” and “stories” secondhand. What is “character arc?” What is “visual gag?” What is “jokes for parents?” What is “story?” Foodfight! haunts me, but I hope that by enumerating the film’s innumerable sins here, I can finally let it go. This is not a commentary. This is an exorcism. Store closed, party time. I am so excited. Fart. Indie Rocktopus fucked around with this message at 03:29 on Jul 28, 2014 |
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Jul 28, 2014 01:28
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How guilty should I feel for immediately thinking "well, what about the Peter Lorre weasel?" when you said "nothing in the film works"? The failures of physical comedy involved are so thorough that they almost entail a new, unique form of physical comedy.
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Jul 28, 2014 02:06
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Yuck. This is like a cross between E.T. and a cooked chicken.
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Jul 28, 2014 02:40
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I am so enthused for this. 
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Jul 28, 2014 04:01
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SpiritualDeath posted:Yuck. This is like a cross between E.T. and a cooked chicken. If you weren't planning on it, you need to do a brief overview of Larry Kasanoff. The man is Hollywood personified.
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Jul 28, 2014 05:42
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The "stolen hard drives" are more interesting than anything that happens within Foodfight!, so it's a shame we will never be sure of the whole story. Crashed drives, stolen drives, industrial espionage, or accidental deletion, I wish I could hear the full story of the incompetence involved. Could it be that their animation process was so broken that things looked worse the more they worked on it?
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Jul 28, 2014 06:02
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I own one of those Daredevil Dan plushes. I got it from a claw machine at a theater, even got it with another thing at the same time by grabbing two in one. I didn't even realize what it was I had grabbed until I pulled it out of the prize catch. I had already known of and had seen Foodfight! several times before this moment. When I held that plush in my hands, my face was  for at least an hour, with one thought in my head."There was Foodfight! merchandise?" And then I started taking pictures of it with other stuff and tweeting them as selfies. 
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Jul 28, 2014 07:04
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Aren't the bad guys in ths movie just generic brands? Making the moral of the story "don't buy less expensive products that don't pander to children in their advertising"? I've never seen it myself, looking forward to your analysis.
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Jul 28, 2014 08:41
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kjetting posted:Aren't the bad guys in ths movie just generic brands? Making the moral of the story "don't buy less expensive products that don't pander to children in their advertising"? I've never seen it myself, looking forward to your analysis. It goes deeper than that. Generic brands are literally Nazis. Not metaphorically, I mean the characters LITERALLY dress up in Nazi uniforms and discuss rounding up the undesirables. And the name brand products are good guys who stand up for things like fun and eating doughnuts. It is the most shameless type of corporate propaganda, aimed at children in a movie full of blatant sexism and homophobia. And it's not even Rocky and Bullwinkle style "wink-wink" jokes for the parents, I mean there's a gay vampire who blatantly wants to gently caress the male comedic sidekick, who himself earlier sees an attractive woman and offers to spray her with his chocolate frosting.
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Jul 28, 2014 12:39
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Crappy Jack posted:It goes deeper than that. Generic brands are literally Nazis. Not metaphorically, I mean the characters LITERALLY dress up in Nazi uniforms and discuss rounding up the undesirables. And the name brand products are good guys who stand up for things like fun and eating doughnuts. It is the most shameless type of corporate propaganda, aimed at children in a movie full of blatant sexism and homophobia. And it's not even Rocky and Bullwinkle style "wink-wink" jokes for the parents, I mean there's a gay vampire who blatantly wants to gently caress the male comedic sidekick, who himself earlier sees an attractive woman and offers to spray her with his chocolate frosting. The best part of the Nazi plot is that the mascot characters are called icons. Or, for short, "ikes".
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Jul 28, 2014 13:12
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Dex Dogtective is Jewish. No, really.
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Jul 28, 2014 20:54
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Das Boo posted:Dex Dogtective is Jewish. No, really. He's also a dog who loves eating raisins, the food product represented by the love of his life, who is somehow a cat-person despite being a regular human on the box. Raisins are poisonous to dogs. Imagine the horrors of the post-Finding Nemo toilet holocaust, but on a grander scale, as dogs around the country die from toxicity poisoning due to this horrible movie that was thankfully sealed away, safe from the eyes of
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Jul 28, 2014 21:27
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PART 1: there is no joy It isn’t difficult to watch Foodfight! online. I don’t mean via sketchy foreign video sites that are constantly removing then reposting copyright material – I mean there are like three different uploads of the entire godforsaken thing on Youtube. There’s the CharlieSheenDog livestream. If you’re tempted to see it for yourself it does not require any internet wizardry or especially illegal activity to do so. I would not necessarily recommend this. One of the things I’d like to avoid in this review is excessive hyperbole. While Foodfight! is probably the worst film I’ve ever seen – I’ve heard convincing arguments that it’s the worst animated film of all time – it’s still not the loving Necronomicon. You won’t stick your eyes out with forks after watching it. But Foodfight! is still strangely compelling, even addictive, in its awfulness. You may be tempted as I was to learn more about its production, or to watch it again to try to better comprehend the totality of its failure. It can become a massive waste of your time. Part of the reason I’m writing this is in hopes of allowing curious readers to experience Foodfight! without needing to actually expose themselves to it. I would recommend taking a look at both trailers for the film, which I mentioned in the previous post, as the changes in character design and animation quality are instructive in a number of places. I may also link to some clips or GIFs of particular moments in the film, because there are some visuals I simply cannot hope to capture in prose. This post is going to be a long one, probably the longest. Foodfight! does so much wrong, but fortunately one of its crimes is its repetitiveness, so while I need to break down some of the film’s failures in detail here I won’t need to when they recur in future installments.  Foodfight! introduces itself with some spectacularly incompetent “squash and stretch” effects. There are two reasons I’d like to draw attention to this title screen. First, it makes no visual sense; we see a couple of tomatoes splat against the screen, then the mess from the splattered tomatoes get squeezed forward by a shopping cart, and then the whole thing snaps back into its original shape. Second, spectacularly incompetent squashing, stretching and squishing will be a visual motif throughout Foodfight!  “Nothing much happens here after dark,” says the kindly old shopkeeper voiced by Ed Asner. This is funny and ironic because much happens here after dark indeed. We’ve all heard this joke before (“Oh, that thing never happens,” and then that thing happens.), but one of the things I find weirdly engaging about this film is how totally inane the script is. It’s an hour-and-a-half sequence of clichés, catchphrases, quotes ripped off from better movies, and half-assed puns strung together in an almost arbitrary sequence. It’s sort of like reference humor (which the film also abuses) just instead of the lazy but occasionally amusing joke of showing us a familiar figure in an unfamiliar setting, it’s terribly animated characters saying things that people say. The camera pans left, as the lights shut down over the aisles and displays… and then there’s a magical sparkle sound effect, and we pan right again, as the lights come up on the bustling city of Marketropolis.  Marketropolis makes no sense.  Does the grocery store actually transform into a city? Is it in an alternate dimension or something? Does this only happen in this one store, or are there other versions of the city and its inhabitants in every grocery store in the world? What happens if a human enters the store at night? How is there a sky here?  All of that may sound pedantic – and I understand that far too much of internet criticism is comprised of nitpicking at plot holes or minor incongruities in movies. But this film repeatedly and shamelessly violates logic and reasoning, usually for terrible jokes. I’m not asking for a consistent Foodfight! expanded universe with an independent continuity for Foodfight! On Ice, here. I’m asking for a narrative that, if it has occasional lapses in its internal logic, is entertaining enough for me to overlook them. I’d also like to transcribe some of the lyrics of the opening song: “It’s our world / it’s my life / and the party starts jumping when we all come out tonight!” “At the end of each day with the fading light / me and my friends come out to greet the night / to show ‘em we can take it, and then you’ll see / a beautiful world made for you and me!” The music itself is lousy, but these lyrics stand out because they’re so hopelessly generic; they could be used in literally any children’s film containing an adventure in a hidden magical world. You could use these for Shark Tale or Bee Movie, or The Chronicles of Narnia, or whatever.  The first mascot character we see is Larry Miller’s Gay Count Chocula, who will be one of our recurring cast members. In keeping with the films themes of “out-of-context movie quotes” and “nonsense dialogue assembled from clichés,” he is smacked by the Vlasic Pickles Stork and cries out “hey, I’m flyin’ here!”, which cinephiles will recognize as a bastardization of “hey, I’m walkin’ here!” from the X-rated male-prostitution drama Midnight Cowboy.  This is funny because he is flying, not walking. I mentioned in the previous installment that every single shot of Foodfight! contains a multitude of sins, and this is a fine example. (To the script’s credit, the Midnight Cowboy quote isn’t totally out of left field here, because this character is in fact a gay sex predator. Again, everything that is comprehensible in Foodfight! is inextricably linked with several things that are terrible.) But aside from the pointless dialogue, a great deal of what is awful about Foodfight can be seen in this shot: - The character design is repulsive. It’s unclear if he was designed from the ground up as a “parody” of Count Chocula, or if General Mills forbade use of their character once they got a look at his role in the script. But we’ll see plenty of cases later on where the filmmakers clearly intended to use a famous mascot but were denied and forced to come up with a half-assed replacement. This becomes particularly ironic when the main villains of the film are revealed as “Brand X” icons for generic products, cheap knock-offs trying to steal loyal customers away from their favorite brands – and yet half the cast is composed of such cheap knock-offs. There’s still no reason for GCC to be as ugly and unimaginative as he is. He’s a chocolate-loving vampire bat in a magical grocery store! Give him giant wings! Make his fangs look like bendy straws! Make him green or white or chartreuse (a lot of characters in the film are awkwardly flesh-colored)! Do something! - The animation, where Gay Count Chocula hovers around while lackadaisically flapping his arms, is lazy and unconvincing. - The Vlasic Pickles Stork, a character prominently featured on the cover of the film’s DVD, flashes across the screen in less than a second and says nothing. He’ll appear at for less than thirty seconds over the course of the film. This raises two questions: why is the Vlasic Pickles Stork front and center on the cover, if he never says or does anything of note? and why do the filmmakers think anyone else cares about the Vlasic Pickles Stork? It’s like when they stick Batman or Wolverine on the cover of a low-selling comic book to drum up sales, except it’s the loving Vlasic Pickles Stork. - The Midnight Cowboy line is a fine example of the film’s lazy “parents in the audience” humor. Someone says something you may have heard someone say, in a different context. Foodfight! has a variety of jokes intended for adults, and as hackneyed as this bit is, it’s one of the least offensive.  We then meet additional minor or totally irrelevant characters. Foodfight’s taking another page from the Pixar playbook here: introduce a crowd of charming supporting characters with small but memorable roles, confident in the knowledge that every one of them will be someone’s favorite and thus another vehicle for merchandizing. You need something to fill out those eight weeks of McDonalds toys, after all. The reason this tactic fails here is that, unlike Hamm or Rex or the little three-eyed claw machine aliens, every character here is annoying and ugly. French Cheese Guy drops several stories and bounces off an awning (why?); we see a never-named, poorly mo-capped dancing elephant celebrating the closing of the store (why?), then shouting “I’m dizzy! I’m gonna barf!” (why?). And amusingly, even though it’s central to the premise, Foodfight! only occasionally bothers to inform you what products these characters are supposed to be advertising.  The most pointless thing here is the introduction of Kung Tofu the Kung-Fu Dragon. He stands in front of a massive crowd (leading a martial arts class, I think?), bows, and then for absolutely no reason sprints away with his neck stretched out, so his face can remain on screen while his body vanishes. You’ve seen this on Looney Tunes, as a quick visual gag when a character runs offscreen. But here it’s totally inexplicable. We don’t know who the character is, he says nothing beforehand, and we don’t follow him afterwards to another scene. It’s a half-second punchline stretched out for ten seconds and divorced from any kind of context.  And after him we get to the farting frog; this is another case where I think it’s informative to break down the entire shot. A frog jumps out of the sewer. We have no idea who he is or what he’s supposed to be advertising, and his major distinguishing characteristic is he has a crown levitating above his head, seemingly glued to the back of his eyeballs. He says “I’m so excited.” He farts. The manhole cover shot into the air by his entrance (or his fart?) then lands on him, sending… sewage splashing up? Squeezing poo poo from his rear end? It’s unclear. (Fart Frog’s actually visible for a second in the first trailer, with markedly better animation and his crown actually on his head, around 0:54.)  In any case, this sends a Dreamcast-level render of brown liquid splashing (and I hope you’re a fan of a Dreamcast-level renders of splashing liquid, because you’re going to see plenty) onto innocent passerby Mr. Clean! Mr. Clean appears repeatedly over the course of the film, but presumably due to a stipulation from Proctor & Gamble he does not speak at all. (Wikipedia informs me the character did at one point speak in a deleted scene.) Remarkably, he maintains his poise here even after being doused with sewage/frogshit. Finally we meet our protagonist: Dex Dogtective, marketing icon of Cinnamon Sleuth cereal.  I think it’s best to address this right off: yes, Dex Dogtective is voiced by Charlie Sheen, he of memetic infamy, whose life has been in an drug-fueled tragicomic spiral in the decade since the start of the film’s production. Let us together acknowledge together the incongruity of Hollywood monster Charlie “Tiger Blood” Sheen voicing a talking anthropomorphic dog dressed like Indiana Jones in a children’s film. There. I swear, no Charlie Sheen jokes.  Our hero Dex is on top of a hot air balloon, facing off against a giant rat named Fat Cat Burglar and his Hairless Hamster Henchmen over a basketful of totally motionless CGI kittens. (These are not cutesy descriptions of the characters, but their actual names in the film.) Charlie Sheen sounds bored here: “Listen up Fat Cat Burglar. I’m giving you one last chance to hand ‘em over before I cash in your coupons for you.” The animation and character designs here are as thoughtless and hideous as everything we’ve seen before, but as our protagonist Dex merits special consideration. Dex Dogtective is Indiana Jones with an orange dog’s face. In a fictional world where you could justify literally almost any design for your hero character, an octopus or an anthropomorphic chicken leg or a talking can opener, that strikes me as particularly unimaginative. It’s not a irredeemable character concept, and the original trailer does a fair job of making Dex look appealing. But the bright colors and expressive animation seem to have been lost with the stolen hard drive, and we’re left with a much duller version of the character, incapable of facial expression apart from opening his mouth and adjusting his eyelids/brows. I would love to see an art book for this film; I’m curious if there was any stage at which these designs looked good.  (There are also a few obvious questions here: Why is “Fat Cat Burglar” a rat? Is it because he steals cats? And why do the hamsters chase after a piece of cheese, while the cartoon rat is indifferent?) Dex foils the crime. The hamsters do a variation on the old Wiley Coyote “don’t fall until you look down” gag, and the burglar says “I just want to be loved, is that so wrong?” as he’s flying away on a burst balloon: again, punchlines and stock phrases, apparently intrinsically funny without any context or setup. Dex then swings down into the middle of a park, surrounded by media and cheering crowds, somehow presciently aware of where Dex was going to land.  He’s interviewed by a parrot creature (a Toucan Sam ripoff?) with a Joan Rivers voice, because Joan Rivers impersonations are the cutting edge of children’s entertainment; in the original trailer, she appears a human-faced bee creature, but that design didn’t have cleavage and so was justly abandoned. In the background, the hamsters begin to drop from the sky, despite the fact that they already did in the previous scene. We get Dex’s (vapid, irrelevant) catchphrase for the first time: “The secret’s inside.” And with that, we’re officially almost five minutes into Foodfight! We haven’t even gotten started. Next time: It warms my heart how much you love my raisins, tough guy. APPEARANCES BY ACTUAL LICENSED MASCOTS: 2 GROTESQUE SEXUAL REFERENCES: 0 (...yet.) EXPLODING GOOP EFFECTS: 7 (six on the title screen, plus Mr. Clean.) NEXT TIME: Daredevil Dan and Sunshine Goodness. Indie Rocktopus fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Jul 29, 2014 |
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Jul 29, 2014 01:14
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Holy poo poo, there are zombie monsters in the background of that last shot.
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Jul 29, 2014 06:35
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I'm dying here.
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Jul 29, 2014 15:02
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Samovar posted:I'm dying here. Which is a coincidence because when I first sat through this piece of poo poo I wanted to die Can't wait to read the next part. 
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Jul 29, 2014 17:11
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I'm ashamed to say that of all the films covered in this thread, this is the only one of them I've actually seen. And it's a loving catastrophe.
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Jul 29, 2014 22:03
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corn in the bible posted:I'm ashamed to say that of all the films covered in this thread, this is the only one of them I've actually seen. Hey, on the bright side, it means you can only go up in quality from there!
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Jul 29, 2014 22:21
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PART 2: i will suffocate slowly in a pit of human filth We’ve got two more major characters to introduce before we can move into the film's second act and start the plot. Last time I wrote about how Dex Dogtective, in theory, could have been a perfectly adequate protagonist for a children’s film if not for his disastrous implementation. As we’ll see, these two do not share that distinction.  Dex is consulting with a friend about proposing to his girlfriend. He got her a four-carrot ring, with carrots. This is an actual pun, instead of a non sequitur sequence of exclamations and stock phrases, which by the film’s standards is remarkably sophisticated humor.  Meet Daredevil Dan the Chocolate Squirrel. Let’s see what he has to say for himself: “I’m your best friend! Daredevil Dan!” (Subtle exposition here, because the audience could not infer that this new character whom the hero confides in about his relationship anxiety is his friend.) “The most stunt-flying, death-defying chocolate ike…” (The grocery store inhabitants are referred to as “ikes,” short for “icons,” which seems inappropriately reverent of characters like Twinkie the Kid or that goddamn Stork, and manages to take on increasingly uncomfortable implications once the villains are revealed.) It seems the producers thought Daredevil Dan was going to be the big audience favorite, because he not only got a plush toy (apparently available in claw machines nationwide) but a starring role in his very own I Can Read! Book, an honor no other character shares. Dan is an example of a distressingly common archetype in animated films. He’s a sassy animal sidekick voiced by a black person, the subject of repeated jokes about how being his particular species of sassy animal is equivalent to being black. But because the character is not literally an African-American human being, he’s allowed to reinforce all kinds of obnoxious stereotypes while still affording the filmmakers plausible deniability against accusations of bigotry: How is that racist? He’s not black, he’s a squirrel! (When he calls Dex “dawg,” I’m uncertain if this is racial insensitivity or another attempt at a pun, and I’m not sure which would be worse.) Dan’s design seems to have changed a bit between the theft of the hard drives and the film’s release. Unlike every other character, the revised version is actually not worse than the original depiction of the character, which is differentiated by its different-colored snout and cheeks and its impossibly smug poo poo-eating grin. This is a case where the lack of facial animation works in the films’ favor, because Dan 1.0’s expression is completely insufferable. (I was amused that they seem to have forgotten to update that art for the final film, so the logo on Dan’s plane and jacket as well as the promotional tie-ins all feature the first version of the character.) Daredevil Dan is… if we’re measuring the awfulness of elements of Foodfight! on a scale of 1 to 10, where absolutely nothing in the film falls below a 6 and then average is around an 8, then Daredevil Dan is probably a 7. He’s still abominable but he’s not as obnoxiously racist as that mosquito in Bee Movie or the twins in Transformers 2, and compared to everything surrounding him his presence is fairly muted. He does provide a terrific example of the filmmaker’s go-to solution for punching up a visually boring scene: continuous mo-captured movement, mostly spinning and exaggerated arm motions. But as a failure of writing, design and animation, Dan doesn’t even compare to the young lady we’re about to meet.  This is Dex’s love interest, Sunshine Goodness, a raisin mascot (analogous to the Sun-Maid Girl) played by Hillary Duff. Three obvious points demand to be considered before we go any further: 1) Production began on Foodfight! in 2002. Hillary Duff was born in 1987. Charlie Sheen was born in 1965. 2) Sunshine’s character model is incontestably atrocious. It was dredged up from the deepest quarries of the uncanny valley, in a film that practically lives there; it is repeatedly and nightmarishly sexualized; it looks like a teenage girl with cat ears, presented as a love object for the dog-faced, Charlie Sheen-voiced adult hero. I once assumed Sunshine had been designed as a human woman, and that the animators added the cat ears, whiskers and tail when they realized how creepy it would be to have her romanced by a humanoid dog. But the production artwork in the NYT article and the first trailer reveal this isn’t the case - she looked like this from day one. The character’s animation in the original trailer is actually more weirdly sexual than in the movie. And as we’ll see later, the filmmakers have no qualms whatsoever about depicting interspecies romance. 3) As other posters here have pointed out, raisins are toxic to dogs. Sunshine Goodness is also an almost parodically bad female lead. She gets a perfunctory line where she flirtatiously boasts she could “kick Dex’s butt,” possibly an attempt to establish her as a Sassy And Independent Female Character, and at the film’s climax she manages to fight the female antagonist in a barely-animated showdown with its own ugly implications; but otherwise Sunshine spends her entire ten minutes of screentime caring for children, flirting, going on dates, being tied up, and getting married.  Sunshine is introduced teaching a group of huge-eyed kids “melonball,” with a melon that is conspicuously superimposed over the rest of the figures in the scene, and arbitrarily explodes on Dan after being kicked without incident five or six times, because he is a comedy relief and this is jokes. We also get another terrible exploding goop effect. Sunshine suggests they petition Chef Boyardee for a “feastamongous” dinner, or play a game of stickball with Mr. Clean, a line I can’t even begin to parse. She tosses Dex a raisin, and we get the following immortal exchange: “You want some?” (Imagine this in Charlie Sheen’s raspy, lewd voice:) “Oh yeah.” “Aw. It warms my heart how much you love my raisins, tough guy!” I can’t think of anything useful to add to that last line. It exists. It was written, recorded, animated and included in a $65 million animated film. Literally dozens of people must have approved of it over the course of this process.  Dex picks Sunshine up and spins her around, and although I refuse to check if there any upskirt shots because hell no jesus christ it wouldn't surprise me. He carries her over to a secluded romantic dinner, where they’re greeted by Stereotype Italian Mob Moose. Mob Moose is… well, he’s a character. Again, there’s nothing substantial to add here. Picture a big cartoon moose guy who talks like a mob enforcer, and you have predicted everything he will say and do. We get some more romantic dialogue between our lead couple, with Sunshine maintaining her trademark vacuous grin, but before Dex can pop the question they’re interrupted by Dan. Dan is skywriting an illustration of Dex proposing, but he can’t do the final loop-de-loop, which I only mention because Dan’s inability to perform a loop-de-loop and then later on his sudden ability to perform a loop-de-loop in a tense situation is this film’s idea of a character arc. Anyway Dan crashes. Sunshine runs off to check on him, spitting her own (vapid, irrelevant) catchphrase (“When in doubt, just do the right thing, and it will always turn out.” Turn out how?) then promising Dex she’ll be right back.  The camera zooms out from Dex, alone and dejected in a field of Nintendo 64-quality tiled grass textures, and we cut:  APPEARANCES BY ACTUAL LICENSED MASCOTS: 1 (We’ll be generous and count the Chef Boyardee namedrop) (So 3 total.) GROTESQUE SEXUAL REFERENCES: 0 (…keep waiting) (Again, I’ll be generous and assume the raisin thing wasn’t intended as innuendo.) EXPLODING GOOP EFFECTS: 1 (8 total) EXCEPTIONALLY TERRIBLE ELEMENTS SO FAR: “It warms my heart how much you love my raisins, tough guy!” Next time: Oh. Mamacita. How bout some chocolate frosting. I’d like to butter your muffin.
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Jul 30, 2014 00:54
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Indie Rocktopus posted:GROTESQUE SEXUAL REFERENCES: 0 (…keep waiting) (Again, I’ll be generous and assume the raisin thing wasn’t intended as innuendo.) Don't be. Particularly considering that the innuendo alludes to the creepy underage thing.
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Jul 30, 2014 01:49
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I like how much the characters spin during normal conversation.
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Jul 30, 2014 02:07
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I actually thought Dan looked better in the old trailer than in the finished product. Maybe because his old design at least had some texture and color segmentation to it, rather than just a flat mess of poo poo-colored squirrel that looks like it was hit in the face with a door.
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Jul 30, 2014 04:51
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This topic inspired me to finally watch Foodfight. Wow, this movie sure does throw a lot of bizarre poo poo at you incredibly fast. Also I had to pause it because Christopher Lloyd's character made me crack up for a solid 5 minutes. I'm honestly convinced that he's just one big animation error that somehow made it into the final product. e: Its like they challenged themselves to make a character out of the going to the store video. Mantis42 fucked around with this message at 05:39 on Jul 30, 2014 |
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Jul 30, 2014 05:36
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Mantis42 posted:This topic inspired me to finally watch Foodfight. Wow, this movie sure does throw a lot of bizarre poo poo at you incredibly fast. Also I had to pause it because Christopher Lloyd's character made me crack up for a solid 5 minutes. I'm honestly convinced that he's just one big animation error that somehow made it into the final product. In complete fairness to the movie, the fact that he walks around like he's barely human is, in fact, intentional.
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Jul 30, 2014 05:52
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Had to pause it again when the movie started evoking the Holocaust and the California Raisins played La Marseillaise. What the gently caress is this?
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Jul 30, 2014 06:23
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Everything looks so incredibly ugly. The color palette is a mess, the clothes have no wrinkles, the camera angles are amateurish, And what's with that distance blur and sky gradient? There's just no excuse. This iteration of the movie was slated for a 2005 release. Toy Story came out in 1995. There's no excuse for this game looking like cutscenes from a budget PS1/N64 game.
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Jul 30, 2014 07:54
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This is the Bubsy 3D of animated films.
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Jul 30, 2014 10:15
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I watched the first 12 minutes of this film, maybe I'll watch more, who knows. But urgh, when the girl turns up, it's the worst loving thing. The editing, the camera-decisions, like, I don't know the correct terms, but it's so off-putting how it goes to a POV style and then back out during her introduction. I just don't get how this happened at all, I don't get how it cost $65million and yet I hadn't heard of it until this week. If they had managed to get the Sun Maid brand on board then I'd have maybe understood the humour and tone this film was going for because I ate those raisins a lot and never thought "drat, this girl could get it." and anyone taking that leap of imagination deserves my immature giggles but forget that, there's a blonde with cat ears so let's just have that. Also I feel it's worth mentioning the film's opening, if we're kind and don't include the exterior neon lights, it takes 24 seconds to turn off the lights. I've never worked at a store, or in a big building that closes. But I imagine turning off all the lights does not take 24 seconds and if it does then great, well done to the film's researchers, but maybe use some creative licence and speed up that process. This film is terrible. I know that's been said and that this is the whole point. But seriously, gently caress this film.
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Jul 30, 2014 10:25
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Jesus, look at those textures. I remember watching the trailer for this... thing some years ago, and maybe my memory is playing tricks on me, but it didn't look this dreadful. If you told me you're actually reviewing Foodfight's brazilian knock-off (The Little Advertisements?), I would believe you.
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Jul 30, 2014 11:54
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I have had exactly one Maya class. I had never touched a 3D program before and this is about my skill level. But no one paid me $65 million.
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Jul 30, 2014 15:48
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Yeah, when I tried to watch this I think I made it about twenty minutes. Everything is so goddamn floaty it nauseates me.
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Jul 30, 2014 16:02
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Thanks for doing this review! There was no way on Earth I was ever going to do a full breakdown of Foodfight. You're right, it's the wrong kind of bad movie for me. I hate Bee Movie but it does feel like a product. Foodfight just, what the gently caress is it? So you are brave, and you are doing an excellent job enduring and relaying the magnitude of this travesty. I agree with the point about internal logic, which was one of the most consistently frustrating things about Bee Movie (and in comparison, one of the better things about Shark Tale). It's literally exhausting as a viewer to try to keep track of a setting that is constantly violating its own expressed rules. I think it's double-exhausting when it halfheartedly pretends to tie to our world somehow, and in that way the real icons actually do Foodfight a further disservice. Anxious to keep reading! 
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Jul 30, 2014 17:39
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Thanks, Pick. I got a lot of enjoyment out of reading your reviews, so I'm glad I can return the favor.Samovar posted:This is the Bubsy 3D of animated films. Which I guess makes me the Ulillillia?  The Bee posted:I actually thought Dan looked better in the old trailer than in the finished product. Maybe because his old design at least had some texture and color segmentation to it, rather than just a flat mess of poo poo-colored squirrel that looks like it was hit in the face with a door. I think you're right. It's mostly that I can barely stand to look at that smug loving grin in the promo art, and I consider the fact that they lacked the technology to recreate it in 3D a blessing.
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Jul 30, 2014 19:45
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How can you call Dan poo poo-colored when Cheasel is coming up?
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Jul 30, 2014 20:18
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Corek posted:How can you call Dan poo poo-colored when Cheasel is coming up? There's a fine line between poo poo colored and literal log of poo poo with googly eyes. Cheasel goes flying over that line in the most gloriously disturbing ways possible.
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Jul 30, 2014 22:34
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Cheasel's my favorite character, though. 
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Jul 30, 2014 22:54
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PART 3: imagine a boot stamping on a bag of chips forever Good morning, Mr. Clipboard! This character is one of the best-known elements of Foodfight! He represents the animators’ attempt to create a disturbing, inhuman character in a film where every frame of animation is already disturbing and inhuman; the result is so strange and awkward it’s almost transcendent, and the effect is compounded by Christopher Lloyd’s slobbering, deranged vocal performance.  Mr. Clipboard explains the store’s been chosen to test out the new Brand X detergent. As he’s explaining the virtues of his product, Clipboard snatches a bag of potato chips off the shelf then grinds it under his shoe. The soundtrack plays a maudlin orchestral flourish here, and Kindly Storekeeper reacts to this as if he just watched the murder of a small child: “That was a perfectly good bag of chips! Never opened, never enjoyed…” It doesn’t occur to him, however, that he should ask Mr. Clipboard to pay for the merchandise he destroyed.  Then a totally unexplained voice mutters darkly from amid the remaining bags of potato chips: “No one wastes me chips and gets away with it!” This is the Potato Pirate, the chips’ mascot, a plot-relevant character the film could easily have shown us in the opening musical sequence but was forsaken in favor of introducing us to Fart Frog and mute Mr. Clean. What Foodfight! is dancing around, here, is the idea that that purchasing and consuming groceries is a meaningful, even sacred act. Wasting a bag of chips is a sin. In the same way that Toy Story celebrates the relationship children have with their toys, Foodfight! treats our consumption of junk food as a magical, life-defining experience. This is a self-evidently stupid and even perverse idea, but as we’ll see it informs much of the film’s ideology.  We return to Marketropolis, where Dan wakes Dex up from a nightmare about the vanished Sunshine Goodness. In his grief following her disappearance, Dex has retired from dogtective work; now he dresses like Humphrey Bogart and runs the Copabanana nightclub in one of the film’s many out-of-left-field nods to Casablanca. After some exposition, Dan offers Dex a lift to the club in his plane. Dex declines, so we follow Dan’s flight over. En route, he catcalls a woman on the sidewalk below:   “Oh mamacita! Yo, Sweet Cakes! Ooh, nice packaging! How ‘bout some chocolate frosting! I’d like to butter your muffin!” Sweet Cakes is voiced by Haley Duff, Hillary’s older sister; she is depicted as a completely ordinary and realistic human woman, with no mascot-like features whatsoever. In a film full of unanswered questions, Sweet Cakes is a total enigma. What is she doing here? What product is she supposed to advertise? Why does the squirrel want to gently caress her? You may notice I’ve been tallying “Grotesque Sexual References” at the end of each post; creepy catgirls aside, Dan’s lines here are the film’s first significant step into gleeful and unrepentant sexual perversion. These aren’t subtle background jokes that parents will get but kids will overlook; this is the story putting everything else on hold for a few moments so that our comedy relief squirrel sidekick (get your Daredevil Dan stuffed toy, kids, on sale now!) can explicitly and unmistakably attempt to convince a human woman to gently caress him. These are barely double entendres. “Chocolate frosting.” “Butter your muffin.” Right now, it’s more baffling than disgusting, but we aren’t even close to the film's nadir. Anyway, Dan looses control of the plane. There are a couple of gags of him scrambling to fix it and pulling arbitrary items out of the cockpit. (An alligator? Haha, how did that get in there? This movie is crazy!) I only mention this bit because Dan winds up crashing into a tree inhabited by “gnome” creatures that are obviously half-assed last-minute replacements for the absent Keebler Elves. Their lines are typical of the film’s ‘throw one-liners at the wall” approach: “Women and children second, gnomes first! I’ll sue! Abandon tree!” Also, Dan says “nuts.”  Then it’s back to Dex, on his way to the club. But before he can get there we have another bit of business to attend to.  Meet the Shitweasel. Cheazel T. "Shitweasel" Weasel is the film’s attempt at a sleazy underworld character; he’s voiced by the film’s director, Larry Kasanov, doing a mediocre Peter Lorre impression. He’s another character who received a plush toy, and was clearly intended to be an underdog favorite. He looks like a dick made of poo poo.  Shitweasel is shaking down Polar Penguin, another awful character, possibly even more annoying than the Shitweasel is. Polar is supposed to be cute and endearing, and like everything else in the film he misfires, although not in a spectacular or interesting way; he’s just kind of nasal and annoying. There’s a running gag where he’s constantly complaining about how cold he is. Why is he cold? He’s a penguin! He’s supposed to be too hot, that’s the stupidest, most obvious joke about cartoon penguins! How do you gently caress that up? Dex rescues Polar and confronts the Shitweasel, who demonstrates the film’s strategy of keeping secondary characters in constant motion by squirming and stretching himself instead of spinning and flailing. I can’t really do justice in prose to how this character moves. It’s a combination of deliberate exaggeration, as he stretches his neck all over the place, and this weird rotating and swelling and contracting of his oversized abdomen and thighs. Then we get this jaw-dropping line of dialogue: “Perhaps you desire a companion for those, heh heh, lonely bachelor nights?” And Shitweasel offers to sell Dex a blow-up doll. This is not ambiguous. Shitweasel pulls open his jacket and we get the old cartoon gag where it’s packed full of random items that couldn’t possibly fit inside. Except there’s a blow-up doll.  See? There it is. Top right. It’s a blow-up doll. Shitweasel gets hit by a trolley (which runs on train tracks that appear from nowhere, through the random back alley where they’re speaking). This establishes Shitweasel’s role as the film’s whipping boy for slapstick comedy, which never quite works because of weak animation and the character’s awful, amorphous design; there’s no weight or impact as he’s getting flung around, it’s just an ugly elongated shape flailing through space and slapping against objects.  APPEARANCES BY ACTUAL LICENSED MASCOTS: None (3 total) GROTESQUE SEXUAL REFERENCES: 3 EXPLODING GOOP EFFECTS: None (8 total) EXCEPTIONALLY TERRIBLE ELEMENTS SO FAR: “It warms my heart how much you love my raisins, tough guy!” Mr. Clipboard’s voice and animation “Perhaps you desire a companion for those, heh heh, lonely bachelor nights?” Next time: Melts in your mouth. Not in your hands. Tell me what that means in this context.
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Jul 30, 2014 23:40
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This genuinely looks like the opening to some sort of bizarre indie music video meant to satirize... something.
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Jul 31, 2014 00:22
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| # ? Apr 23, 2024 08:40 |
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The Mr.Clipboard scene is the only genuinely good thing about Food Fight, the part of this movie thats "so bad it's good"
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Jul 31, 2014 00:42
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