April the twentieth, otherwise known as 4/20, is upon us. To me, the day is about spreading good vibes, a kind of pleasance and joy that don't normally come with other days. It's a day to just chill, or it would be if it wasn't on a Thursday this year... but I digress. To celebrate the stoner holiday, I figured I'd look at a stoner movie, the problem is, animation and stoner movies don't seem to be that common. I mean you can make cases for movies like Yellow Submarine, Alice in Wonderland or Spirited Away, but those movies aren't really the kind of stoner comedies as something like Dazed and Confused, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, Pineapple Express or even Tenacious D In: The Pick of Destiny, thankfully, I happened across a copy of Cheech & Chong's Animated Movie, which is just perfect.
I'm only as familiar with Cheech and Chong as anyone else who grew up when they were icons, but never had any of their records or movies. So, I know of them but I'm not as familiar with them or their bits. Stoner comedy is a very different style of comedy to other kinds, and as such it can be a difficult genre to get into. It can range from slow and monotonous to bizarre and absurd, so I think the big question for this review is ultimately, is this good for Cheech & Chong fans and is it good for newcomers?
So this is where I would usually go into the plot, what the major events are and how the plot flows together. Just one problem with that, there really is not plot to this movie, sorta. It's all just a collection of classic Cheech & Chong sketches put to animation, and I mean that literally. I can't find any evidence to this, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was literally the skits from their records put to animation. Lots of their classic skits including Sister Mary Elephant, Dave, Ralph and Herbie, Let's Make a Dope Deal, Trippin' in Court, and Earache My Eye. It's funny, not the movie itself, I'll get to that in a bit, but the fact that there aren't too many animated sketch comedy films. Yes, we have movies that are package films, but those are typically movies they can chop up and air as segments on their own, I mean movies like Monty Python's The Meaning of Life or The Kentucky Fried Movie. We don't really have the movie version of Robot Chicken or MAD or anything like that. Actually a MAD movie might be interesting. We don't really have a lot of animated sketches loosely tied together with some central plot or theme. Oh yeah, the scenes that tie this movie together follow a genital crab trying to land in Tommy Chong's beard, yeah, raunchy and toilet comedy are going to be present a lot in this movie.
Guess that should be my segue into talking about the comedy. This is a Cheech & Chong movie after all. So, is this movie funny without the need for uh... comedy enhancing psychedellic smokable plants? Well... not really. A lot of the humour is very slow moving and I just kind of wanted them to get to the point faster, but after a while I did kinda get into the pace and flow of the movie. I dunno, if you dig slower kind of laid back humour, you might get into this movie. Then again, as stated before, there is quite a lot of toilet humour, well "humour" is the wrong word, unless you find the image of a dog's anus opening up to let a giant turd out to be funny. To be fair, some of the toilet humour was somewhat amusing, Cheech urinating on his car trunk yelling to the people inside of it is kind of funny, so I think most of the humour is going to depend on your tolerance for slow comedy and toilet humour. Again, this is not my style of humour, so I wasn't super into this, but I could dig the pacing and tone after a while.
All of the voices in this movie are done by Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong, and they do good work... I think? Again, I have a hunch that they may have just taken their old recordings and put them to animation. In the Sister Mary Elephant sketch, when the Sister Mary Elephant character yells, it sounds like somebody blowing out their headset mic on Audacity, not like professional recording. That being said, I wouldn't be shocked if they did redo their skits for this movie, since Cheech Marin has done plenty of voice work in the past, such as on Oliver & Company and The Lion King, while Tommy Chong did films like FernGully and Zootopia, plus the two did a bunch of comedy albums, plus the movie had a couple of people in the sound department, according to IMDb, so it could have been either. Either way, the vocal work is solid.
What isn't very solid is the animation itself. I'd usually go into issues with the animation with any other movie, but the issue with the animation here can be summarized in one sentence; It looks like a cheap Flash production. Characters look flat, everything is coloured with solid colours, light and shading is basic, and when characters are meant to move smoothly and have some flow to their movement, it looks really off because the rest of the animation looks stiff and cheap. I don't think anyone really wanted to make this movie look spectacular, I wouldn't be surprised if they aimed for something simple looking, but this looks like something you would see for free online, not a theatrically released animation. I feel like something like this might make someone's opinions of theatrical adult animation much less positive, which is totally not fair.
So, where do I rank Cheech & Chong's Animated Movie? It's... watchable, mostly harmless, but not essential viewing. If you have the comedy albums, I'd say listen to those instead, maybe watch Up In Smoke too, but it might be interesting as a curiosity viewing. I think movies that you need to watch stoned off your butt to enjoy kind of miss the point entirely, like yes, they're funny when you're too high to remember you have hands, but they also should be funny when you're sober. That being said, I didn't have an awful time with this movie, and I did feel the vibe after a while. I'd imagine this as a decent film to put on in the background and chill. This is a very different style of movie than I am used to reviewing, so I'm glad I saw it, but I don't think I'd choose to watch it again. This movie fits very nicely in the "Slight Recommendation" category of movies. Hope you have a happy, SAFE and RESPONSIBLE 4/20 everyone.
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