Review: Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters

by James Rocchi Apr 13th 2007 // 9:02AM

Filed under: Animation, Comedy, New Releases, Theatrical Reviews, New in Theaters, Family Films




I'm 37. If I lived in medieval times, I'd have five kids and about five years left to live. If I lived in Victorian England, I'd have a block-rocking mustache, three kids and work in either the mines or the docks. But in the 21st Century, 37 is not old; I have dreams, hopes, aspirations, action figures. Still, I felt old watching the beginning of Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters; I felt clueless, slow, uncool -- like I'd been left out of the joke. But, as ATHFCMFfT unspooled, I felt less old -- primarily because I realized I wasn't left out of the joke; rather, there was no joke to get.

Created as time-filler for Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" late-night programming block, Aqua Teen Hunger Force the TV show followed the adventures of talking, mobile, super-powered fast-food items. And by "adventures," I mean the opposite of adventures -- squabbling with each other, dodging work, arguing with their landlord. There's Frylock (voiced by Carey Means), the smartest of the crew; Master Shake (Dana Snyder), dim and vain; and Meatwad (Dave Willis), bone-stupid and bonelessly malleable.

Begun by Dave Willis and Matt Maiellaro, Aqua Teen Hunger Force has run for five seasons; I couldn't tell you if that's a good or bad thing, as I've never been able to watch an episode through. Oh, people I know love ATHF -- unabashedly, and I don't think it's just drug-induced -- but it has no sticking power for me. And showing me ATHF bigger and longer and uncut doesn't do much to change that.

In Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters, our three non-heroes are embroiled in the hunt for a piece of exercise equipment that's actually an ancient weapon of unearthly power. Also involved is the team's nemesis Dr. Weird, as well as a talking tiny watermelon slice that floats around in a hollowed-out watermelon and is accompanied by a similarly-tiny version of Rush drummer Neal Peart (voiced by the real Neal Peart, of course), who punctuates the talking slice's every pronouncement with a tiny, rocking solo.

God, I felt high just typing that. And, this is leaving aside the two talking, snide moonmen who function as a Greek-geek chorus to the action, or the evil presence of time-traveling Abraham Lincoln, or Dr. Weird's lair being converted to lofts. This, then, is as good a point as any to bring up my big objection to ATHFCMFfT -- and other niche animation projects like strongbad.exe -- which is that all the wacky characters and spiraling series of references and hipster-dry 'It's so not a joke it's funny. ...' deadpan absurdities don't have a goddamn thing to stick to. I like surreal animation and smart-stupid jokes; show me The Venture Brothers and the late, lamented Clone High and I'm in high-low comedy heaven. But while The Venture Brothers and Clone High manage to have weird, wild references and moments -- the former invoking everything from Henry Kissinger to Mary Poppins in one episode, the latter full of talking kidneys and mockery for John Stamos -- but they also have through-lines of character that give the story, and viewers, a spine to follow. ATHF, on TV and on the big screen, just floats in a cloud of mist, directionless, content to sigh in a haze of hipster apathy and too-cool-for-school pronouncements; I call it smugsmog, and to hell with it.

As for the animation, well, it's not terribly animated. The rising power of computers and lower price of processor time have done for animation what they've done for special effects: Namely, made it a lot easier and cheaper to incorporate those elements into dull stories. As a piece of animation, ATHFCMFfT is pretty much devoid of craft, full of computer-aided cost-cutting techniques that give it a herky-jerky and cheap look. And, again, that may be part of the joke, but why am I not laughing? I don't want us to return to an age where fields of stout-shouldered workers hunched over the tables in Disney's slow-grinding mills were the only people who made animation -- but at the same time, that approach had some human interactions to it, flashes of random wonder, a sense that it was made by people working in pursuit of a common goal. Watching ATHF feels like you're on the other end of a low-fi mind-beam directly from Dave Willis and Matt Maiellaro, mired in minutiae and fond of long pauses because they're easy to animate -- or, rather, not animate. The level of animation in ATHFCMFfT is often as crude and blank as a cardboard cutout pasted to a stick moved against a painted backdrop. Actually, cruder even than that; you can practically hear the mouse clicks in the theater during ATHFCMFfT as the computer animation scuttled and froze across the screen.

That must be it: I'm old. Or at least, I prefer clumsy sincerity to cold irony, snappy dialogue more than awkward silences, cameo appearances you can measure in minutes, not seconds. (Hey, look! Tina Fey has one line of dialogue as a 9-layer burrito!) And, according to The Reeler, ATHF co-creator Dave Willis had this to offer in contemplation of the film at its New York premiere: "We just have this motto, which is 'none of this matters' and we live by that." Watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters, you see him die by it too -- as he and Maiellaro give us a piece of sterile-messy, loose-and-rigid, laden with air-quote irony 'entertainment' so self-satisfied it slowly suffocates over 86 minutes.

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Tags: Adult Swim, AdultSwim, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, AquaTeenHungerForce, Matt Maiellaro, MattMaiellaro

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