Rocky and Bullwinkle Review
Cinematizing once-popular television shows is generally a crapshoot, and the resulting movies are generally just plain crap. What a welcome surprise, then, that Universal's mega-budgeted gamble on the most fondly remembered of animator Jay Ward's TV 'toons is so light on its feet. The movie is so packed with knowingly dreadful puns, wily sight gags, and self-referential cheek that it's impossible not to be charmed. To a fuller extent than any film since 1993's The Fugitive (an entirely different sort of enterprise, to be sure), The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle succeeds in recapturing the satisfaction and sensibility of its small-screen predecessor.
The fun kicks off with a breezy animated prologue, during which we discover that, in the more than three decades since the cancellation of their show, our heroes and their hometown of Frostbite Falls have fallen on hard times. All the town's trees have been cut down, the residuals checks the boys are cashing are barely worth the paper they're printed on, and, as the narrator's booming baritone informs us, "Yes, even their wordplay had become stilted." ("No," Bullwinkle interjects, "it was always like this.")
The plot gears begin to spin when the dastardly Fearless Leader and minions Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale escape to the real world, where they assume human form (and are played by, respectively, Robert De Niro, Jason Alexander, and Rene Russo) and enact a scheme to achieve world domination by "zombifying" the people of America with "Really Bad Television." Who can possibly foil their evil designs?
Yanked into the real world by FBI agent Karen Sympathy (winning newcomer Piper Perabo), our heroes embark on a cross-country odyssey from Los Angeles to New York, with just 48 hours to go before Fearless Leader's heinous plan comes to fruition.
The 3-D animated versions of Rocky and Bullwinkle interact remarkably well with the various humans they meet on their heroic quest. (The only scenes that don't totally fly, ironically enough, are shots of Rocky soaring over the treetops, Superman style, carrying Agent Sympathy — guess not even $90 million can get you perfectly seamless digital composites.) The inevitable comparison is to 1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit? — a well-timed throwaway one-liner tells us that the producers know it as well as we do — and Rocky and Bullwinkle meets and exceeds that high standard. The vocal wizardry is perhaps even more critical than the visual F/X, and in this regard, the movie is flawless: Original Rocky voicer June Foray seems hardly to have aged a day, and rookie Keith Scott does a thoroughly credible Bullwinkle.
In the end, however, it's all about the comedy. There are puns galore — "You weigh 400 imaginary pounds." "Yeah, but it's all mooscle!" — but much of the humor is surprisingly sophisticated: A running gag about the suburban sameness of Middle America is so neatly done that it doesn't fully register until the third or fourth time it plays. There are more than enough nuggets like these to hold the interest of parents, kids will crack up over the more obvious laff lines, and both will chortle at the broad humor of such drolleries as an Oklahoma state trooper with a tagalong cameraman shooting footage for Made Up Stories of the Real Highway Patrol. It's tough to sustain this kind of comic nuttiness for 90 minutes, and The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle sags a bit in the middle — but wherever he is, the late Ward is probably smiling.
