I hope this 2nd movie of the Futurama franchise is looked back on one day as the only weak film of the bunch. At least it's out of the way early on. Though clearly done with tender loving care and respect for the fans, "Beast with a Billion Backs" lacks the zip of the first film.
"Bender's Big Score" was a triumph of Futuramaness and though "Beast..." does carry on the tradition of crazy crap going down, it just isn't as funny as it's predecessor. The storyline changes quite a few times, making this hour and a half literally feel like 3 or 4 episodes sloppily thrown together with the backdrop being the monster hinted at in the movie title. The jumpy storyline and lack of in-your-face jokes made this tough to sit through the first time but there is so much going on you can't not watch!
What I've always liked about Futurama is that it's not afraid to blow up a planet, cut off someone's head, destroy the known universe or re-write the laws of physics and then justify it for the rest of the episode (or keep it as a plot point for the ongoing reality of the series). In many classic cartoons, someone gets hurt and is fine in the next frame but in Futurama, if Hermes' head gets cut off as it did in "Big Score", he's going to have to deal with it until a solution arrives. This trick alone makes Futurama stand out from other animated series and gives fans lots of easter eggs to enjoy as the stories unfold. In "Beast", for example, there's a casual shot of Leela filling the tank of the Planet Express Ship with a drop of Nibbler's poop. Fans know that Nibblonian droppings are condensed dark matter, which the ship happens to run on. Each character has their place (even Scruffy!).
The "beast" in the title is a multi-tentacled planet that only wants to spread feelings of love (the overall theme of this movie is 'love', which is crammed down our throats a little too heavily). After some time-killing subplots that beef up the 'love, actually' feel of the 1st half of the film, the beast eventually shows up and takes over all living beings, much to their joy! All robots, including Bender, are not effected by this love and, though you'd expect that to have some effect, Bender spends most of this film in his own side story. With the planet being taken over, you'd expect the two stories to merge much sooner than they do and it's a pretty big distraction waiting for something to actually happen.
The movie is certainly depending on fan appreciation because if I wasn't a fan, I would not have listed the first 30 minutes. I can just imagine my mom watching, for example, and within 20 minutes I would not blame her for for inquiring what the hell was going on. However, as experienced Futurama fans, we trust that the strange dialogue, half-laugh jokes and elaborated scenery are all going to play a role in the grand scheme of the script. The writers have always had a 'har har' way of making a sentence you heard at the beginning of the story make it's way to be the solution to the problem at the end of the story. It's always a nice payoff and these movies are fun, well animated and cleary chock-full of inside jokes, hidden gags and mathematical inserts that the writers are all too happy to explain in the DVD extras.
I look forward to the next few dvd releases because the characters and universe in which they live are lovingly consistent that it's nice we have this chance to visit them since the series got cancelled. I look forward to watching "Beast..." again with lowered expectations because, other than the noted problems with the less punchy jokes and mixed-bag storyline, the characters and situations are classic Futurama!
1 comment:
not to distract from the post but Wall-e is a must see.
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