Powerpuff Girls: Season 6

I didn’t finish watching Powerpuff Girls for a long while. In part, it was because it’s a shame to see the end of a classic show, but mostly it was because by season 6, it wasn’t really feeling like a classic any more.

The show had been on air for over 6 years by the time it finished, and felt like it was running short on ideas. Weird and politically incorrect Rocky and Bullwinkle parodies, returning a monster baby to its mama and poor Buttercup being told she’s got no particularly special talent over the other girls don’t feel like the playful and inventive episodes of old. The season plays out without the sparkle of inventiveness or irreverence that characterised its early run. A steampunk episode, featuring the Steamypuff Kids, is pretty fun, though.

The Powerpuff Girls have endured in a way that not many similar shows have. There was the anime spinoff, the spiritually similar early My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and now a new revival that I haven’t seen yet. The designs are enduringly popular and rewatching old episodes never fails to put a smile on my face.

But the problem is that there’s only so far you can go. Sure, you can give the little kindergarten-age heroes crushes on some boys and have them go from fist-fighting with their antagonists to going camping with them, but they’re still funny little bug-eyed kids with insane super powers. There’s nothing to discover about their pasts and no angsty teenage plot arcs they can go through. So flipping to alternate worlds of the wild west or making a whole episode in the style of the Who’s concept albums starts to feel a little like scraping the barrel.

But apparently there are enough stories to tell for a new series to come out. So I guess my Powerpuff adventure doesn’t stop here.  

The Powerpuff Girls – season 1

After the previously-documented show pilots, The Powerpuff Girls made it to a full series at the end of 1998, a couple of years later than its partner Dexter’s Laboratory. Though clearly Craig McCracken’s baby, Tartakovsky is clearly still heavily involved, co-directing a majority of the episodes.

It’s clear from the start that the series was heavily developed before ever reaching the air. It’s not unusual for a series’ title sequence to show characters who don’t appear until many episodes in, but this one even has characters who don’t even appear until the early episodes of season 2 – the guy from The Collector and, more prominently, Princess Morebucks.

The series does that very syndicated-American-toon thing of having no establishing episode or premiere but simply launching into the setting without explanation with the assumption that the audience knows the scenario and characters already – so random episodes can easily be broadcast in any order. It even seems very likely that ‘Tough Love’ rather than ‘Octi Evil’ was written as Him’s introductory episode, but things were swapped around. Indeed, however the show was broadcast when I used to watch it on TV was likely pretty random – I’d seen most of these episodes before, but some, like ‘Insect Inside’ and series finale ‘Uh Oh Dynamo’ were new to me.

Split into 22 half-episodes and 2 full episodes, Powerpuff Girls is very easy to watch. Its exaggeratedly cute characters are of course adorable, but what makes the likeable is the heavy emphasis on their faults and failings despite their powers. Bubbles is childlike and gullible, a bit of a crybaby despite not wanting to be underestimated, allowing for her to be adorable, to learn and also for reversals like her deciding she wanted to be ‘hardcore’ being very funny. Tara Strong’s brilliant voice work (here still credited as Tara Charendoff, as she hadn’t gotten married yet) brings the role to life. Blossom is perhaps the least immediately distinct of the three, wanting to be a leader and taking charge, but getting a little boastful when she develops new powers and easily annoyed when Buttercup challenges her authority. And Buttercup is the quintessential tomboy character, making her most probably my favourite – she’s stubborn and self-conscious and that makes me feel like she’s actually the most vulnerable. And y’know, there’s something pretty heavy about an episode where she falls for a guy, he makes her feel really special and loved, and then only by happy accident does she see he’s actually just getting her out of the picture so he can brutally murder her two sisters. That’s a lot for a kindergartener to take on!

Indeed, the series gets its adult-friendly edge in two ways, really – first, by being irreverent with what’s appropriate for kids to see, taking pride in showing gross-out humour, its tiny adorable heroes being constantly abused both physically and mentally, a whole episode about how funny the mayor looks without any clothes on, and in its wanton destruction, the certain death of many thousands of Townsville residents. And second, with a real sense of bathos – some episodes feel they’re late in the run of a well-established show, like one with Mojo just trying to go about his daily routine in peace but the girls bothering him interminably, endlessly and indeed unendingly. A new superhero shows up but turns out to be engineering crimes, but the way the girls beat him is by doing the very same thing. And one episode is about the Gangreen Gang making prank phone calls, which ends up with the villains sorting the problem out while the heroes are unawares.

The strength here is really in the characters, major or minor. The girls are immediately engaging and understandable, Professor Utonium’s protective nature but vulnerability to women is easily understood and though some baddies are duds – ‘Roach Coach’, with power over cockroaches, for example, or some kid who eats glue before a radioactive insect turns him into a huge hulking glue monster that’s actually one of the girls’ toughest challenges – many, many more of them are brilliant and iconic. The Gangreen Gang and the Amoeba Boys from the pilots/shorts are great, but it’s really Mojo Jojo with his ridiculous pleonastic way of speaking and Him with his evil mind games that stand out as classics. The Rowdyruff Boys are an obvious but strong idea, and Fuzzy Lumpkins becomes much stronger conceptually with his pseudo-Southern attitude to people on his property. Plus you can’t help but love the Mayor.

The voice work is also top-notch, which is something that made 90s cartoons appeal so much to Gen-Xers and stoners. The three girls have an instant dynamic, two of them having starred in Rugrats before this, and of course Tom Kenny puts his stamp on every role he plays, from Spongebob to The Ice King. Where Mojo’s daft speech patterns came from I do not know, but they’re absolutely inspired, and Him’s voice sends chills down the spine.

Being ironic and going for a lot of parody – from Star Wars to Godzilla – protects the show from a lot of criticism. Of course it’s lame – it’s a joke on silly superhero tropes! But there are some real shortcomings. Sometimes the episode length means a strong idea has to just be randomly dropped, like when Him’s Octi just blows up because it’s made to drop the captive girls, or when a cure for a terrible disease can simply be taken out of the Amoeba Boys. It is also unashamedly politically incorrect to the point of being offensive – racial caricatures abound, there’s something anti-trans in how Him is portrayed, I don’t know why Mojo has that accent and with the mecha parody episode and all those unflattering representations of the Japanese, it’s amazing they loved it so much. And while sure, kids won’t notice or care, this is emphatically not just for kids and I don’t see what gets added by it.

But it doesn’t stop the real brilliance of the writing, how it turns typical Hanna Barbera-style cartoon making into something hip and intelligent, or how well-performed and well-executed the whole thing is. Impressive work.

The Powerpuff Girls / Whoopass Stew! – pilots, forerunners, and show history

Lest we forget, my blog is intended to be about animation from around the world, even if I horribly neglect the Golden Age, arthouse European and experimental shorts that I sometimes watch. But I do sometimes get through an entire American cartoon series and write up my thoughts – albeit mostly something nostalgic from the 80s. But I fully intend to watch the totality of The Powerpuff Girls, one of the best of the cartoons around in the late 90s and early 2000s, somewhat after my main period of watching cartoons for fun but before I got a bit more serious about the art form.

In many ways, The Powerpuff Girls, along with its sister production Dexter’s Laboratory, defined how animation would look for the decade that followed. The bold, simple lines, extremely flat presentation, tongue-in-cheek, anarchic and hyperactive direction and post-Ren & Stimpy Show self-awareness not only proved hugely influential and spawned a slew of inferior imitations but created a style that was easily adapted into Flash for easy animation – for better or for worse.

But the series began in 1992 with a very silly short Craig McCracken made at CalArts – which of course was founded (through a merger) by Disney. While Genndy Tartakovsky was making the short that would later become Dexter’s Lab, Craig McCracken put together a funny little short called Whoopass Stew! – The Whoopass Girls! in: A Sticky Situation!, starring as you may have guessed the Whoopass Girls, who of course would later be refined to the more universally-acceptable Powerpuffs. He worked on three more mini-episodes, but never finished them, and the little story with its intentionally retro set-up is imaginative but very thin. The first of the Powerpuff Girls’ nemeses to appear, perhaps surprisingly, were not Mojo Jojo or Him but the Gangreen Gang – there essentially to get wiped out in an introductory scene – and the Amoeba Boys, who here had not yet got their endearing quirk of being useless at crime but prove quite formidable opponents for the girls, almost absorbing them before they seem to spontaneously develop powers of flight (it being ambiguous before that whether they were flying, leaping or simply running without a solid background) to take the poor criminals to roast in the Sun itself. Impressive powers these Whoopass Girls have.

The young CalArts animator must have created a buzz of some sort – McCracken’s slightly unsettling No Neck Joe played at some animation festivals, and so did this short, and apparently the right people took notice, because he was in 1993 hired as the art director for Hanna-Barbera’s Two Stupid Dogs shortly before they were absorbed into Warner Brothers – after just enough time to define what Cartoon Network was going to be. After a couple of years of Tartovsky paying his dues on Batman and The Critic, Genndy Tartakovsky was recommended by McCracken and the two soon began to assert their presence in Hanna-Barbera just as it seemed to be turning a corner with this fresh new blood. Being in the right place at the right time, the two former classmates were to provide the first episodes for Fred Seibert’s new, expensive project to produce a great number of pilots for potential shows, which he called What a Cartoon! (and also World Premiere Toons, but that was just for promotion). From the same trailer, the two collaborated to develop their student films, the very first of this influential series eventually being the 1995 pilot for The Powerpuff Girls, and the second being Dexter’s Laboratory. Both also had a second pilot in early 1996 – and though it seems apparent that it was McCracken’s creative properties that were given precedent, it was Tartakovsky’s that were the more immediate hit, winning a vote and becoming a series in its own right later that year. The Powerpuff Girls, meanwhile, would not get its own slot until 1998, which was after fellow What a Cartoon! pilots Johnny Bravo and – sad to say – Cow and Chicken.

It’s not entirely a surprise that the two pilots didn’t hit the chord the series eventually would manage with a generation in which cartoons are adored by both little kids and stoners in their teens and 20s. The pilots just aren’t a very good representation of an idea, and it’s down to McCracken’s writing rather than Tartakovsky’s animation direction. In the first episode, Fuzzy Lumpkins – an ugly and jarring design if there ever was one – gets angry that the girls don’t name his meat jam as winner of a competition so goes on a rampage with a gun that turns everything to meat, including the mayor – though he can still talk. In the second, rather better episode, the Amoeba Boys now have their useless hook and have to be taught how to rob a bank by the girls – but it’s an angle that thrives on knowing and loving those good-hearted girls so doesn’t work when they’re brand new to an audience. Quite apart from the unpolished visuals compared with the developed series, the trouble here is that the storytelling just isn’t smooth enough to work.

But Hanna-Barbera and Cartoon Network had turned a corner with these shorts, and soon Dexter’s Laboratory would be such a hit it was impossible to ignore. So Powerpuff Girls thankfully got another chance. Series 1 eventually followed. 

Hotel Transylvania

Despite the impression that this is just one in a long line of forgettable CG comedy films, it was actually one of the best little Hallowe’en treats in a while. Sony is still getting on its feet as an Animation department, with The Smurfs not exactly well-received and Arthur Christmas (as well as The Pirates!) probably more closely associated with Aardman than with Sony, but this was a big step in the right direction. They took the wise decision of getting in someone with TV animation pedigree – Genndy Tartakovsky of Dexter’s Laboratory and Samurai Jack fame – and though his pedigree with CG feature-length films isn’t exactly glowing (The Clone Wars film), this is more in-keeping with the tone of his prior work.

And it was good. There were a few misfires – bad fart jokes, a rather underdeveloped scene where the main characters end up in a monster festival and a male romantic lead who it took a very long time for me to find likeable, but that’s far outweighed by what the film got right.

Icons of horror have long been prominent in comedic animation. From Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies through Count Duckula and Doctor Zitbag’s Transylvanian Petshop to last week’s Frankenweenie, the icons of gothic literature and Hammer Horror films are the right mixture of strong characterisation and silliness and basically write their own stories. And here’s one that’s a classic storyline but neatly 21^st-century.

In the world of Hotel Transylvania, the monsters are terrified of the humans. Angry mobs and pitchforks have taken their toll, and Dracula himself lost someone very close to him. Retreating to an extremely well-hidden hotel, he raises his little daughter Mavis and keeps her so close she’s stifled. Though he promises her freedom on her 118^th birthday, he keeps tight control even then, going so far as to have his zombie minions pretend to be pitchfork-wielding humans in a nearby village to give her the impression that they’re all out to kill monsters. However, when a happy-go-lucky young human called Jonathan finds his way to the hotel during a big birthday get-together, Dracula finds himself struggling to keep control.

Monsters bring with them lots of obvious humour – The Invisible Man is sensitive about things people can’t see, the Wolfman has doggy habits and a whole brood of uncontrollable welps, and Frankenstein’s monster for whatever reason has a very Jewish bride. Dracula here is a very entertaining character, immense power hidden behind a very daft, insecure and controlling personality, non-violent and only vaguely threatening and very likeable, which is not only a credit to his design and writing but to Adam Sandler’s performance. His daughter Mavis, voiced by Selena Gomez (who I’m not sure I’ve seen in any of her Disney-related things or heard singing in any conscious way), was adorable in design, in character and in bat form, and it was cute that Sandler’s wife and daughter voiced the family in flashbacks.

The film’s mixture of humour and sentiment is a bit oddly-paced and free-wheeling, but that keeps things rolling along at an even keel and is in the spirit of the film’s message that controlling too much is bad and sometimes you should just enjoy yourself going with the flow. There were some random things, but most of them were also funny, like Dracula randomly throwing out a rap involving just about every possible rhyme for ‘Zing’, including ‘The Lion King’. That was one of the pop culture references thrown in there that might date the film very quickly, as well as a dig at Twilight – and I’m sure more than one viewer will make the comment that this was ‘still a better love story than Twilight’, which was certainly true.

Unlikely to go down in history as epoch-changing or essential viewing, this was still a very good example of a fun, family-friendly CG film with a few images that ought to endure. 

Star Wars: The Clone Wars

This film was pretty dreadful, really, but switch off your brain and you could enjoy it. It belongs on television, not on the big screen, and it felt like a bit of a swiz to be watching such an unimportant bit of Star Wars history in the cinema, the plot revolving around Anakin getting an annoying chirpy padawan and the two of them getting caught in a plot to frame the republic for the kidnapping of Jabba the Hutt’s son.

The stylised art seemed to have been made to look as though carved out of wood to directly reflect the dialogue, which was grimace-inducingly stilted and pompous. It was cut from the same part of the Star Wars cloth that makes you long for Han Solo’s scepticism and the grit and grime of the Millennium Falcon. The romance was of the fallen Empire, and the prequel universe still doesn’t seem to quite fit, the Empire having lasting such a shamefully short time, the idea of Yoda just going off and hiding in a swamp instead of allying himself with the rebels more than a little odd, and now we have to wonder why Jabba makes no reference to these events.

On the other hand, the film told a neat story, it had moments of cuteness, and even though the comic relief battle droids aren’t my favourite idea of Lucas’, their stupidity was quite amusing at times.

(originally written 24.8.08)