Tim here. Our tour of the films submitted for this year's Best Animated Feature Oscar now takes us to the most obscure American-made film on the list, Regular Show: The Movie. It's a spin-off of an absurdist Cartoon Network series – that is, absurdist even by the standards of Cartoon Network – which was given the tiniest whisper of a theatrical release to ensure the publicity of articles like this one. So, a success!
The film has the freaked-out energy of a kid on a sugar rush, and assembles its plot in roughly as coherent a manner: in the future, talking raccoon Rigby (William Salyers) and talking bluebird Mordecai (director & series creator J.G. Quintel), formerly best friends, are on opposite sides of a galactic war to stop a rift in the space-time continuum for devouring all of existence. The only way to do this is for a mortally wounded Rigby to travel back to the present, where his younger self and younger Mordecai are working a dead-end job as park groundskeepers. And they have go back even further, to high school, where Rigby told a lie that kicked-off the creation of a broken time machine that led to that same rift in space-time. [More...]
If it's not clear from all of that (and really, nothing is clear from all of that), Regular Show: The Movie is driven primarily by a rather thoroughgoing "okay, so let's just throw a bunch of ideas out there and whatever" vibe. That ruthlessly streamlined plot synopsis covers up a lot of shagginess involving the friends' slacker attitude and a supporting cast of weirdly-shaped humans and animals, among them being not one but two people with giant circles for heads, and a white gorilla voice by Mark Hamill in the style of Harvey Fierstein. The movie's screenplay, credited to no fewer than nine people, positions the film securely in the realm of the Hang-Out Movie, where sticking around to watch boldly-defined, silly characters set loose to be themselves regardless of the situation.
One's tolerance for that sort of thing obviously rests upon the affection one can drum up for the characters in question. I can't speak to the feelings of the Regular Show faithful (who've made it one of Cartoon Network's most-watched series), but as an outsider, the movie doesn't work very hard to generate that kind of affection. A healthy amount of the film's comedy derives from us, and the rest of the cast, recognizing that Rigby and Mordecai are kind of dumb and annoying, and not always in a charming way. Successfully carrying that off means, inherently, that the two leads in our film are a bit irritating to be around.
And there's really nobody else in the ensemble to help with that: the cast is written and, for the most part, acted in about the same way, with a raging wackiness that's high on warped energy, low on and everything else, and weirdly devoid of any sort of perspective outside of the very narrowly-construed twentysomething college dropout male with an underpaying blue-collar job mindset.
That said, the film ends up being weirdly watchable, despite being basically caustic and unlikable. It has an unpredictable, nervy approach to comedy and animation alike, feeling like something that in many respects could have been made by the Flesicher brothers in the 1930s or Tex Avery in the 1950s. The malleable, boneless character animation and brightly-colored designs leave very little doubt that we're in a very free-form cartoon world here, with no designs on anything but anarchic imagination in building gags: only the fact that the humor is more situational than verbal marks this as a product of a 2010s sensibility.
And so we have a film that can include both an extended Star Wars riff and an escalating use of the phrase "breakfast burritos" as a punchline in its opening ten minutes. There's no real limitation on where the jokes can go, so they go everywhere. A little bit of that is exhilarating, and a lot of that is definitely fatiguing – Regular Show: The Movie is all of 69 minutes, but they're dense minutes, and it barely makes it to that length without completely wearing out its welcome. Still, the film knows exactly what it wants to be and it runs after that guns blazing: the joyful surrealism is appealing, and it's obvious that surrealism, more than anything to do with its paint-by-numbers character beats, is the film's most treasured goal.
Oscar Prospects: None. I would frankly suppose that this film comes in 16th out of the 16 films in competition, barring a huge population of Cartoon Network partisans in the Academy.