Leave Those Kids Alone
If you've been keeping up with the cartoon world, you may have noticed that things are exactly the same as
they have always been, only completely different. By
that I mean that all of the necessary components that
have made cartoons such a U.S. media mainstay are
still around: heroes, villains, robots, monsters,
lots of slapstick comedy and violence, and a complete
disregard for the laws of physics. Animated
characters will always, by necessity, it seems, drop
anvils on
one another and foil the plans of mad scientists by
using various superpowers. And yet, if you've seen
some of today's more popular cartoons (such as
PowerPuff Girls, Johnny Bravo, and Dexter's
Laboratory, to name a few), you've probably caught
the distinctly postmodern approach most of them take.
Sure, there's plenty of old-fashioned cartoon hijinks,
but the jokes are delivered with healthy doses of
irony, lots of pop culture references, and a generous
wink to let you know, "Hey, this is a cartoon, and
this is how we do things in the '00s."
Enter Recess: School's Out, the new Disney animated
film based on the popular Saturday morning cartoon.
Like the show, the movie follows the exploits of a
group of elementary schoolers as they torment their
overbearing teachers, such as the shrewish Miss
Finster (April Winchell) and the well-meaning but
clueless Principal Prickly (Dabney Coleman). As the
film opens, the kids are celebrating the upcoming
summer break by pulling one more school prank, namely,
the theft of ice cream bars that are being kept from
the kids by Miss Finster.
The scheme is masterminded by TJ (Andy Lawrence) --
think: Ferris Bueller as a little kid -- the leader of
an eclectic group of friends that includes Mikey
(Jason Davis), an obese kid who sings opera (singing
voice by Robert Goulet); Spinelli (Pam Segall), a
tough girl who loves professional wrestling; sports
freak Vince (Rickey D'Shon Collins); brainy Gretchen
(Ashley Johnson); and Gus (Courtland Mead), the new
kid recently taken in by the group. During their ice
cream heist, which sets up the kids as mischievous
pranksters with the best interests of their classmates
in mind (namely, ice cream), the kids are caught by
Principal Prickly, but they claim immunity once the
final bell rings and they gain their summer freedom.
The story unfolds with TJ feeling lonely as the rest
of his friends go off to various summer camps. With
nothing to do, he ends up wandering aimlessly around
town, and stumbles upon a dastardly operation at his
school involving a crazed former principal, Dr.
Benedict (James Woods), and his plan to change the
orbit of the moon. Naturally, TJ rallies his friends
together and they conspire to fight the wicked Dr.
Benedict. It turns out that Dr. Benedict is so strict
that he wants to change the orbit of the moon in order
to put the nation in a constant freeze, thus putting
an end to summer and creating a year-round school
year.
Like much other current animation, keenly aware of its
own pop cultural context. There's a brief, subtle
Indiana Jones tribute ("Ninjas. Why did it have to
be ninjas?" Mikey complains, when the gang confronts a
group of black-clad warriors); a borrowed Pink Floyd
lyric ("Hey, teacher: leave those kids alone!"); and a
nod to Lord of the Flies, when the kindergartners
don war paint and behave like savages, taking over
their classroom and harassing their superiors (one of
the toddlers demands of his teacher, "You eat
paste!").
Perhaps Recess' most culturally savvy element is its
skewering of the '60s, in a flashback showing how the
ideals of the teachers (particularly Principal Prickly
and Dr. Benedict) have fallen by the wayside as they
were sucked into The System and traded their ideals
for hard-nosed discipline. During this sequence, the
film skewers everything from meditation, to period
dress, to Easy Rider (Dr. Benedict rides a chopper,
the spitting image of a young Peter Fonda). As the
credits roll, the Recess gang plays a song ("Listen
to my green tambourine"), in which they strum
instruments in front of a psychedelic backdrop.
The kids at the screening laughed at all this
silliness, even though they didn't realize that the
filmmakers were making fun of a period of U.S. history
that many of their parents experienced. For sure, the
pop-cultural riffing is intended to entertain their
parents, but I think it has another motivation as
well. The animators and writers of today are the
cartoon-watching kids of yesterday: they absorbed
hours and hours of television as children, and, being
Generation Xers, have a tendency to regurgitate what
they took in as kids, in a smart-alecky way, gleefully
exploiting the past for all its inherent goofiness.
But all this is only the opinion of a 26-year-old. For
one from a much more qualified reviewer, I'll turn
things over to my 11-year-old sister, Rachel, who will
provide her take on the film:
I think people will like the characters in Recess: School's Out, because they are funny. All the
Recess characters have their own personalities. For
example, Spinelli likes wrestling and Mikey likes
opera. The Recess TV show is awesome, and one of my
favorite TV shows. I think both kids and adults will
like the Recess movie.
