The Shockingly Clever New Chip n' Dale Movie is the Successor to Who Framed Roger Rabbit We've Been Waiting For — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

One of the few perfect movies and a creative as well as a technological milestone, Who Framed Roger Rabbit set the bar for live-action/animation innovation so impossibly high that in the long decades since its release its soaring highs have seldom been approached, let alone topped.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit continues to be the gold standard. It probably always will represent the gold standard. So it is exceedingly high praise just to say that another animation/live-action hybrid deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Robert Zemeckis and animator Richard Williams’ timeless classic.

The new Chip n’ Dale movie is not as good as Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Let’s be real: nothing is. But the new Chip and Dale Disney+ is in the same league as the beloved cartoon Neo-noir. It’s in the same ballpark, the same league, with a similarly anarchistic, subversive and obsessive spirit.

On one level that is surprising. Chip and Dale have always struck me as supremely b-listers in the Disney galaxy of stars, chittering balls of mischief who promised never to threaten the popularity of Mickey Mouse, their infamously cruel and demanding boss.

It’s not surprising, however, once you learn that the film is helmed by Akiva Schaffer of The Lonely Island fame. In addition to enriching Saturday Night Live with his genius for years Schaffer also directed or co-directed, in 2007’s Hot Rod and 2016’s Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, two of the funniest and most beloved comedies of the past twenty years.

Schaffer does not have a writing credit on Chip n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers but to its eternal credit it feels like a Lonely Island movie. That’s because, like Hot Rod and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping it stars Schaffer’s Lonely Island partner and creative soulmate Andy Samberg.

Because Chip and Dale are seemingly no one’s favorite Disney legends the filmmakers had more freedom to recreate them in their own ironic, contemporary image.

Who are Chip and Dale in 2022? They’re essentially John Mulaney and Andy Samberg, who don’t just provide the voices of the c-list animated rodents, but their souls and personalities as well.

In that respect Chip n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers suggests a follow-up to Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping as well as a spiritual successor to Who Framed Roger Rabbit in that at its emotional and thematic core is a surprisingly incisive and adult exploration of the joys, pain and compromise of longterm partnerships/friendship.

Re-making Chip and Dale in the image of the distinctive comic performers voicing them yields huge dividends.

John Mulaney was once universally beloved as a humble comic genius who also seemed like a swell guy who overcame addictions and compulsions and was now getting high on his own extraordinary talent and work ethic.

Now Mulaney is equally, if not better known for his messy personal life, divorce and controversial romance and family with actress and author Olivia Munn.

Five words you never want to hear about a favorite comedian is “He just hugged Dave Chappelle.” Due to a colossal error in judgment those words now apply to Mulaney, unfortunately.

But Mulaney’s poor choices do not change the fact that he has is blessed with an unparalleled comic timing and delivery that is on full display throughout this strangely perfect vehicle for his genial comic stylings.

I didn’t just laugh a LOT watching Chip n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers. I guffawed. I chortled. My whole body shook with laughter. At one point I laughed so hard that I had an aneurism and had to spend a week in the hospital, with my family conducting a death watch over my body as it barely just hung onto life.

But it was worth it because not only did I ultimately survive my brush with death, but I had a goddamn blast with a movie that feels throughout like it was made specifically for me and my sensibility.

That’s only partially because it is a movie about making movies and the movie business and I very conveniently happen to be writing an exhaustive guide to just subject.

Chip n’ Dale began life in the 1940s as characters in film shorts but as the title suggests, Chip n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers is a feature-film adaptation and meta meditation on the cult cartoon show from the George H.W Bush era.

The cartoon lasted for three intensely merchandised seasons before leaving the air forever. Schaffer’s movie imagines what happened in the decades following the end of Chip n’ Dale’s shared vehicles.

The excessively responsible Chip leaves the craziness and uncertainty of show-business behind and becomes a successful insurance agent. The carefree and careless Dale (Samberg), meanwhile, has been bumming about show business for decades with only mild success.

The mismatched pair is reunited when their cheese-addicted Aussie compatriot Monterey Jack (Eric Bana) disappears in the cartoon criminal underworld. It’s a seedy nighttime world of sin and degradation where some of the most wholesome-seeming toons commit the most sordid transgressions, including “Muppet fights.”

The brawny rodent has become the victim of a sinister bootlegging scheme that makes real stars of the animated world like Flounder from The Little Mermaid are abducted, changed for the worse and forced to star in shameless knock-offs like Flying Bedroom Boy (Peter Pan), Pooj the Fat Honey Bear (Winnie the Pooh) and Beauty and the Cursed Dog Man (Beauty and the Beast).

The big boss behind the shameless knock-offs in a melancholy figure known as Sweet Pete, who is a grown-up, evil version of Disney’s Peter Pan. Sweet Pete is voiced by Will Arnett, who between The Lego Movie, The Lego Batman Movie and Teen Titans Go! To the Movies and this has become quite the sign of quality and ambition for animated films of distinction that appeal to adults and children equally.

Sweet Pete’s henchmen include a Coca-Cola polar bear and Bob, a viking and viscerally unnerving resident of the Uncanny Valley where so much early computer and/or motion capture animation took place, particularly Polar Express, which is savaged appropriately.

In one of the film’s many brilliant meta gags, Pete is voiced by Seth Rogen and because Robert Zemeckis-style motion capture involves an actor acting out their role on green screen in addition to providing a voice Bob looks like a slightly indistinct version of Seth Rogen as a viking.

Like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a movie it pays reverent homage to in the form of a very special cameo from a Disney icon who doles out appearances sparingly, Chip n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers represents a triumph of coordination and corporate cooperation as well as creativity.

I was perpetually amazed by the wild and unlikely characters the filmmakers manage to rope into their post-modern, endlessly self-referential madness. It’s a world that involves both Paula Abdul duet partners AND at least one countercultural icon created by Robert Crumb, the young people’s favorite.

Chip and Dale may be minor characters in the grand scheme of things but their whip-smart, lightning fast and wonderfully dense motion picture vehicle is a major delight.

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