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Whatever Happened to Those Chipmunks? The clever new Disney+ movie Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers offers a hilarious take on the studio’s favorite nut hoarders! By Michael Mallory
W
hether you remember them as chattering foils for Pluto in cartoons from the 1940s and ‘50s, or as action-adventure Disney afternoon stars from the late 1980s, the new feature film Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers presents the chipmunk duo in a totally unique fashion: as showbiz has-beens. Don’t expect Whatever Happened to Baby Dale? though; instead the film, which is now available on Disney+, is an audaciously satirical take on Disney favorites, inspired not only by the 1989 Rescue Rangers cartoon series, but also the 1988 classic Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In this live-action/animation hybrid produced by Walt Disney Pictures and Mandeville Films, the duo lives in a version of Los Angeles that is inhabited by both humans and toons. While Chip has moved on from his television fame and settled into a comfortable, sedate life as an insurance agent, Dale desperately tries to keep his name alive through appearing at celebrity autograph shows. Like a lot of former celebs, he has even augmented his looks … through CGI surgery. They reunite not to stage a comeback, but to try and find a former co-star that has gone missing.
This approach — which depicts Chip in 2D and Dale in 3D — was the brainchild of TV sitcom writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand (How I Met Your Mother). “We cherish those old cartoons,” says Gregor, “but it felt important not to dump them back into the culture without a good reason for it. We kept tasking ourselves, ‘What would make them modern and give them a real point to exist?’” Mand further states: “To Disney’s credit, and to that of all our producers, they said, ‘Come to us with ideas and the things that excite you,’ so we brought them this meta take on it.” What they inadvertently discovered in crafting a movie about one-time stars, though, was that life imitated art. “I can’t tell you how many times we would say, ‘Oh, we’re working on the Rescue Rangers movie,’ and people would say, ‘Cool! The Rescuers, I remember that,’” Gregor laughs. “Even people who theoretically had knowledge of this era of cartoons assumed it was a different thing we were bringing back.”
A Smorgasbord of Styles As if blending the 1980s 2D look with state-of-the-art 3D in a live-action back-
ground wasn’t daunting enough, Chip ‘n Dale also features just about everything in between. “From Mary Poppins on, you’ve seen 2D in a live-action world,” says director Akiva Schaffer (Saturday Night Live), “but you’ve never seen a film where every version of animation from video games to anime to Pixar style exists.” While Schaffer actively sought out artists from the cartoon renaissance era to work on the film, the larger challenge was technological: making the new animation — particularly some of the CGI — look like it was 20 or 30 years old. “People who worked on movies like Final Fantasy or Beowulf would talk about the struggles they had to perfect it,” Schaffer says. “I would say, ‘Oh, that’s so great … Now, do the opposite.’” In one sequence the chipmunks are confronted by a CG human character (voiced by Seth Rogen) that had to look like an escapee from Y2K mo-capped “action-figure” animation. “The first renders of Seth were beautiful,” the director says. “They looked completely real, but I’d say, ‘No, no, no, it has to look terrible!’ It was fighting every instinct they had, everything they’d been working toward for decades. But at the end of the day, I think they
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june|july 22
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