24 April 2015

DON'T PLAY WITH YOUR FOOD

A review requested by John Grimes, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Scout's honor, I'll get to the review part of the review in a minute, but I can't go into without getting something off my chest, which is that Foodfight! is monstrously unattractive. I would swear at The Hague that this is the absolute ugliest bastard of an animated feature that has ever been released by something resembling an actual animation studio, though in the case of Threshold Entertainment, that resemblance is fucking meager. The whole production history, which would make a movie that's vastly more entertaining than this one, starts with Lawrence Kasanoff, chief executive officer at Threshold (a company specializing in producing short projects for theme parks and such exploiting existing intellectual property), who came up with the kind of must-miss idea that only a studio executive with no connection left to humanity could have whipped up: what about, like, Toy Story with food corporation mascots instead of beloved childhood toys?

That was in 1999. The next couple of years found Kasanoff greasing the necessary palms to get the ultimate experience in grueling product placement off the ground, and beginning production on the thing, with Kasanoff himself as director. It all purred along nicely, until the drives containing all the completed animation were reported stolen in 2002. It would be delightful to assume that this was part of some plan to defraud the investors and corporations who'd paid to have their characters come to life in this film, but that seems hard to square with the rest of the story, which gets vastly more bizarre. Kasanoff, you see, was undaunted by this loss, and attempt to throw himself back into completing his marketing opus, though as recounted in a 2013 New York Times article that reads more like the eyewitness reports of a plane crash than a making-of piece, he didn't know much about directing animation, and his animators didn't know much about the specific tasks they were suddenly forced to do. At this point, the film - now to be carried out using motion capture, which in 2004 was about to score its first major success with the zombie horror film The Polar Express - managed to secure a distribution deal and a release date in 2005 that zipped by without notice; another went by in 2007. Then came the legal action, and in 2011 the film was auctioned off by the insurance company for immediate completion and distribution: the honors went to Viva Pictures, who silently dropped the thing into UK theaters in 2012 for hardly any time, and released it directly to DVD in the United States in 2013, after securing a favorable deal with Wal-Mart.

And under those circumstances, it's no surprise that Foodfight! - see, it's fun because it has an exclamation point! - looks like pulsating ass. It was made quickly by animators who didn't quite know what they were doing with software that wasn't right for the job and given instructions by a man with no clue about anything to do with technology and craft. Still, knowing why something isn't exactly anybody's fault is by no conceivable stretch of the imagination the same thing as making it not an outrageous crime against art and humanity.

And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.

In addition to images that look like what would happen if John Lasseter had the DTs, Foodfight! has a plot. And that plot is this: in the small, traditional grocery store Marketopolis Market, when the shop closes up for the night, the aisles turn into a thriving city populated by all the corporate mascots for all the products sold there - "Ikes", they're called, in recognition of their innate love for the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower* - who spend their days enacting '40s movie tropes and concocting shitty puns. The most level-headed and admired of all the Ikes is Dex Dogtective (Charlie Sheen), a cereal mascot who works as a private eye disrupting the surprisingly robust criminal underground of Marketopolis. He's just cracked his 500th consecutive case, and he plans to celebrate by finally proposing to his girlfriend Sunshine Goodness (Hilary Duff), who with a name like that is amazingly not the logo for a line of racy leather underwear. She's a catgirl who sells raisins. And Dex gives her a four-carrot ring, do you get it, because the three credited writers had a drinking habit to get back to.

Before he can pop the question, though, Sunshine goes missing. And that's not all that's about to shatter the beatific world of the Marketopolitans: the owner of the supermarket has just been strong-armed into stocking the new Brand X by a corporate salesman named Mr. Clipboard, who is voiced by Christopher Lloyd and designed like a level boss from one of the first House of the Dead games. As soon as Brand X shows up on the shelves, its own related Ike, Lady X (Eva Longoria) enters the community, and it's around now that one starts to wonder if the writers actually know what "generic" actually means, This happens, by the way, on the same day that a grim-faced Dex is opening his new club, Copabanana, to drown the sorrows of his lost love and the career that he sent down the shitter when she vanished. It takes absolutely no time before Lady X and her fellow off-brand Ikes begin to take over the city, murdering Ikes left and right, which apparently makes their product taste bad, or not work, or whatever. The film does not clarify its rules. It brags about how much non-clarity its rules have. It straddles the viewer and teabags us with its zeal for not having clear rules.

And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.

Anyway, the whole thing is a clumsy attempt to do bright CGI noir with Dex Doggevtive - I mean, what the fuck. "Dogtective" is not a word that a native speaker of English can pronounce. Longoria, who has to say it the most times, doesn't even try. She just calls him "Dex Dog Tective". But as I was saying, Dex Doveffiv is Humphrey Bogart, trenchcoat and hat and all, and the movie keeps lifting huge chunks of Casablanca in the apparent assumption that it would have violated the dignity of Warner Bros. to try and stop it. This does, incidentally, mean that Foodfight! needs Nazis. And Nazis it gets: the Brand Xers are about as unambiguously Nazi-esque as you can get in a kids' film, right down to the part where they torture an elephant to death with a dentist drill in a kids' film.

Not that Foodfight! has a very clear sense of what it means to be a kids' film. The filmmakers apparently had heard that some family movies have jokes that are mostly for the kids but also some subtle innuendo that's meant for their parents, and they tried their hand at it. This means that Dex's sidekick buddy, Daredevil Dan (Wayne Brady), an incompetent flying squirrel who sells chocolate and is a mind-boggling racist caricature, gets to sneak in such subtle winks and nods to the adults like: "How about some chocolate frosting? I'd like to butter your muffin!" and "I never even got a chance to play 'lick the icing' with Sweet Cakes". or there's this chestnut of seductive dialogue between Dex Doggive and Lady X:
"There are some stains you can never wash out."
"Let's try. I want to scrub your bubbles, Dex."
Later, Dex calls her a "cold-farted itch", which isn't just horribly dirty, it doesn't make any sense. But you, know, for kids! They love the farts. Which is probably why the second thing that in any way resembles a gag in the whole movie is a a frog farting, a propos of nothing.

Though to be fair, the context for a frog farting would probably never make more than an incidental kind of sense.

And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration.

But I was just starting to talk about the Nazis! There are Nazis. There are Nazis trying to take over the city of corporate mascots, using food-based tanks and all. One of the main Nazis, voiced by ace voice actor Jeff Bennett, who I suppose was just glad for the work, discovers in the moment of his death that he's sexually aroused by urinating on himself, and that is not a lie. It's not even an exaggeration.

The screenplay for this film is unforgivable, pure and simple, between the leering sex, the awful puns on corporate names and slogans (which is, for the most part, as close as it comes to its mission statement of combining corporate mascots in a fun shared universe; any character who has anything to do of real importance in the plot is either original or a terrible knock-off), the goddamn Nazis murdering people and taking over their city, the shameless Casablanca thievery. Even so, the screenplay deserved better animation.

There aren't words for how off-putting Foodfight! looks. The characters look like hell, with weird, stiff faces and body movement that has as many points of articulation as a cheap action figure. Most of them have just the one expression, which is how we have a (wildly, wildly sexist) climax in which Sunshine Goodness beams her ecstatic "I love all the world and especially RAISINS!" smile as she wallops the tar out of Lady X, who grimaces with the exact same "I want you inside of me right now, humanoid dog" smolder she's worn all through the film.

And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.

It is insulting to primitivism to describe this as primitive. There has never been a period in the history of commercially-released computer animation where the technique was as clumsy as it is in the very best moments of Foodfight! Hair moves with heads like a thick plastic helmet; liquids slump across surfaces like tar on a frozen day; the backgrounds are fuzzy and indistinct and the foregrounds tend to be slabs of smooth colors with indifferently-applied lighting techniques. If this was a video game and you were playing it in 1996, you might think it looked okay, though not the best thing you'd ever seen. For a theatrical release in the 21st Century, it's an outright insult to the time of the hoped-for audience to think they'd tolerate this for even a minute. Which is a lot longer than I was able to tolerate the unchanging expressions, the unbelievably crude effects work (in the early going, a character cries, and it looks like he's shooting Tylenols out of his eyes - fuck, maybe that's another piece of product placement) and the way that no two objects seemed to be interacting with each other properly.

I'd say that I'm happy that something born from such a vile, mercenary place turned out so poorly and tanked so badly, but compared to the abject misery that is watching Foodfight!, even that happiness is fleeting. This is, in all sincerity, one of the very worst movies I have ever seen, not worthy of even the most morbid ironic fascination. It is dreadful, ugly, stupid, filthy-minded, and morally bereft on multiple levels. Also, you can totally see it for free on Amazon Prime.

30 comments:

  1. I look forward to the forthcoming, sure-to-be long and fruitful run of the "why are there fucking nazis in a children's movie about corporate mascots?" tag.

    This movie is astonishing.

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  2. I first encountered this movie in a livestream with about 120 other people present and commenting in the chat. By the time the actual, titular foodfight rolled around I don't think a single person had the energy or functioning sense of humour left to even make fun of it. Every one of us was completely demoralised and enervated.

    Foodfight! is an unequalled atrocity in the world of American animation and I am so grateful that somebody thought to nominate it during this fundraiser.

    I'm even more grateful for the Revelations-laced evisceration it begot. Thank you so much.

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  3. Considering the atrocities of the script, I think it's all the more fitting that the producers supposedly got their animation stolen and the end result of this ended up looking like a demo reel from the first Bush administration. It would have been even more of an atrocity to waste top-of-the-line animation talent on THIS.

    Also, for extra creepy, supposedly the dialog for THIS was recorded in the early 2000s when they were still looking at a release date around 2013. Hillary Duff was still underage back then.

    And uno mas: are the rumors true that this THING cost about $50 million?

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  4. Meant to say "release date around 2003".

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  5. Awww, Will and Chris sniped the tag and image caption comments already. :(

    But yeah. Awesome review.

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  6. Also, I'm loving the way this fundraiser is basically evenly split between "I want to hear Tim's thoughts on my favourite movie!" and "Dance, monkey! DANCE!"

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  7. Just when I thought that nothing could top "Santa Claus meets the Ice Cream Bunny," this is the best thing you've ever written.

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  8. SURVIVAALLL OF THE FITTEST LEEEAAOOOONARRRRD

    I hope there are more 0/10 recommendations yet to come. Has the abyss been staring also into you?

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  9. "This is, in all sincerity, one of the very worst movies I have ever seen, not worthy of even the most morbid ironic fascination. It is dreadful, ugly, stupid, filthy-minded, and morally bereft on multiple levels".

    The above sentences have incited me, for the first time ever, to leave work early for the sole purpose of seeing a film as quickly as humanly possible. Bless you, Tim, bless you.

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  10. @Arlo: where are the ?/10 ratings for old releases, anyways? I know they're in the page source somewhere, because Rotten Tomatoes finds them, but I can't pick through all that HTML and find them...

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  11. Rotten Tomatoes as you said, though I'm not sure he rated this or Ice Cream Bunny a 0. But by god Ice Cream Bunny feels less like an actual movie and more like a home video of some hideous ritual.

    Foodfight! though could very well be the ugliest movie I've ever seen

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  12. "This is, in all sincerity, one of the very worst movies I have ever seen, not worthy of even the most morbid ironic fascination. It is dreadful, ugly, stupid, filthy-minded, and morally bereft on multiple levels".

    Come on, Tim! Tell us what you REALLY think!

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  13. This film's script is so completely wrong-headed, picking any one moment to truly capture it is a fool's errand, but even so, I think the moment that most speaks to the fundamental rot at the core of the whole enterprise, the thing which guaranteed that, from the moment of its inception, this was never EVER going to work, is when Mr. Clipboard stomps on a bag of potato chips, and we get an extended moment of our Earnest Everyman Store Owner mourning the poor un-opened bag, as if he'd just seen his best friend knifed to death. This is a moment the movie apparently expects us to take 100% seriously. If there is a better summary for the disgustingly-Corporate mindset that birthed this whole wretched enterprise, I don't know what it is.

    Kudos on the review, though. Definitely had me howling (in particular the bit about the narrative's so-called "rules"), and the bible quotes for the screenshots was a stroke of genius.

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    Replies
    1. You got it, highlight reel with: "Never opened. Never... enjoyed."

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  14. I actually enter the RT scores manually, so there's nothing anywhere in the page code. When I move over to the new site, which I still expect to be later this year, there will be ratings on all the classic reviews.

    In the meanwhile, the complete list of Antagony & Ecstasy 0/10 reviews:
    -Foodfight!
    -Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny
    -Movie 43
    -Skullduggery
    -Hell of the Living Dead AKA Zombie Creeping Flesh
    -Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (which, upon reflection, I would likelier give a 1/10)
    -Zombie Lake

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  15. This film's recreation of Casablanca's 'Dueling Anthems" scene was one of the very rare moments where I had to stop a film and take a walk before being willing to start it up again. It is just so vile, so horrible; shit compounded upon shit. Nathan Rabin described the film as "one of those fall-of-civilization moments", and I couldn't have said it better myself.

    One question I'd like to throw out there: can anyone name an animated character who debases art and humanity as a whole more than Cheasel T. Weasel? Because I, for the life of me, cannot.

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  16. Also, I'd just like to clarify: I fucking love this movie.

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  17. "Can anyone name an animated character who debases art and humanity as a whole more than Cheasel T. Weasel?"

    Some of the wacky blackface stereotypes in the '20s and '30s? But nobody with a given name that I can come up with, and never consistently. And certainly not while looking like a tumescent penis made out of diarrhea.

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  18. 1. I am so sorry, Tim. I really am.

    2. I'm terribly sorry if this is explained somewhere that I just couldn't find, but what do the red asterisks mean? There's no matching asterisk or parenthetical at the bottom of any given entry and it's been driving me crazy.

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  19. Shalen - That confused me at first too. Just hover your mouse over the asterisk, and a little information bubble will pop up.

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  20. @ttark: Aha! Thank you! So do they not work on phones, by any chance?

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  21. Shalen - No problem, and yeah, I don't think they work on phones.

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  22. They definitely do not. One of the things for which I haven't figured out a totally satisfying solution, so I've been coasting on "good enough" for a few years now.

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  23. You can't say that in a kids' film! You could barely say it in Mean Girls for Christsake!

    I also love how this film has infected you with so much hatred, you start slaughtering innocent bystanders like Polar Express, as if you're freeroaming in GTA.

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  24. Hey, I don't know that I'd go as far as calling Polar Express "innocent".

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  25. Yeah, that movie is its own crime against humanity.

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  26. So, disregarding all the other horrifying stuff, let me get this straight:

    This is a movie about corporate mascots defending themselves against evil generic brands? That is, it's celebrating the more expensive products sold by the larger, more heavily advertised corporations against the cheaper knock-off products sold by the stores themselves or a smaller, possibly local, corporation? Cheerios is better than Honey Nut Toasted Oats because it has a mascot, and what's more, the latter cereal is actually evil and represented by Nazis? Wow, great message, kids movie!

    Second, and probably more importantly: "The most level-headed and admired of all the Ikes" is played by Charlie Sheen?!

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  27. Just no... just please no

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  28. Just no... just please no

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Just a few rules so that everybody can have fun: ad hominem attacks on the blogger are fair; ad hominem attacks on other commenters will be deleted. And I will absolutely not stand for anything that is, in my judgment, demeaning, insulting or hateful to any gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion. And though I won't insist on keeping politics out, let's think long and hard before we say anything particularly inflammatory.

Also, sorry about the whole "must be a registered user" thing, but I do deeply hate to get spam, and I refuse to take on the totalitarian mantle of moderating comments, and I am much too lazy to try to migrate over to a better comments system than the one that comes pre-loaded with Blogger.