Alvin and the Chipmunks

Every week of this month I will be looking at a certain film series that is harmless for children, but I don’t see the point in them keep making, especially since it’s one of those franchises that is based on a cartoon from the 80s. Plus, there was an animated movie that was released in 1987, which I never saw, so I will skip that. This adaptation is titled “Alvin and the Chipmunks,” released in 2007, which is based on that cartoon, some fans are saying, but not quite: it centers around three chipmunks from the 1950s. MaryAnn Johanson said in her review, “It’s hardcore evidence of what should have been a pop culture novelty gone disturbingly mainstream. Isn’t that enough?”

The first in this series is a reboot story, as we movie addicts say: it stars from the beginning, acting out the story that all of us are completely familiar with like it’s innovative. We meet Alvin (Justin Long, who played Warren Cheswick on “Ed”), Simon (Matthew Gray Gubler, who plays Dr. Spencer Reid on “Criminal Minds”) and Theodore (singer Jesse McCartney, who played JR Chandler in “All My Children”), child chipmunks who are orphans because their parents are hippies, and they are using Charles Darwin’s “Survival of the Fittest” saying in order to make it on their own in the woods – they have not met up with Dave Seville yet, who will strangely decide to raise this trip as his adopted children and make them work singing to make a living, almost literally. Johanson stated, “It’s pretty indescribably adorable, actually, as the boys — CGI in a live-action world, “CGI” being a fancy 21st-century way of saying “cartoon” — croon that “You Had a Bad Day” song in their rodential falsetto while stashing nuts in their tree home for the incipient winter.” For a movie with large potential for scaring kids over the age of three and making you run from your TV screen, “Alvin and the Chipmunks” starts off on a strongly not bad start. The chipmunks try to make you happy with song which is surprisingly upbeat.

The movie sticks to that, for the most part, which is a huge surprise. The trio’s tree is chopped to become the lobby Christmas decoration for a Los Angeles office building, and through troubles very complicated to go into but that work out believably well (as movies about singing chipmunks are told), the three end up under the roof of aspiring songwriter Dave Deville, who writes good-humored music with low-spirited lyrics that no one wants to listen to. Kevin Smith company player Jason Lee makes the entire attempt work because he believes in the chipmunks. Johanson mentioned that, “Lee’s primary costars — who never showed up on the set and only became anything approaching “real” via computer wizardry in the postproduction stage — gave him nothing to work with, but that doesn’t faze him.” He accepts the chipmunks as real, and we do as well.

The little denial they see as emotional, intelligent creatures that just happen to be chipmunks is, in fact, park of what makes this movie work so well. Dave connects their childlike excitement and musical talents to write a song for them… that Christmas Don’t Be Late song we all know verbatim (just act like it’s new). Then they’re off as the most popular singers, and lucky enough to have Dave as their manager in the urban jungle of Los Angeles – he looks out for them in this cruel world of corporate music they find themselves up to their little shoulders in. David Cross is a magnificent disturbance as the sycophantic record-label executive, who becomes the antagonist in this picture – Cross, too, believes in the chipmunks, if in a somewhat more unkind way.

Johanson admits, “Still, satire on packaged pop culture takes a back seat to family melo-comedy, as Lee learns to love the little monsters as his own flesh and fur.” That’s strange, but just seeing Theodore snuggled into Dave’s neck to sleep, getting comfort because he had a nightmare, is cuteness to the max. The boys turn out to be less helpful to Dave than he is to them: their efforts to get him back together with his ex-girlfriend, played by Cameron Richardson, are very unsuccessful, both inside the story and outside. We could have been better without the romantic side-story, in fact, which feels exactly like the padding-out it is.

Still, by restricting itself to exactly one fart joke and exactly one defecation joke, “Alvin and the Chipmunks,” how Johanson describes it, “is positively high-brow in today’s kiddie-flick environment. (Even the romantic stuff doesn’t get anywhere near the icky-squishy stuff some so-called children’s movies do these days.)” This could have been a whole lot worse.

I didn’t see this in theaters, but I did get a chance to see it over at my cousin’s house after he rented it from RedBox. I enjoyed it, so I could call this a guilty pleasure, since there are some good things about it. The choice is up to you if you want to check it out. If not, I completely understand, but if you do and you don’t like it, I get it. This isn’t a movie for everyone.

How does the first sequel do? Check in next week to find out in the next installment of “Alvin and the Chipmunks Month.”