The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle

The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle, a live-action/animation retread of Jay Ward's beloved cartoon, exists on the border between the tenuously real and the purely imaginary. A 2-D cartoon prologue explains that ever since their show was cancelled, in 1964, Rocky the flying squirrel and Bullwinkle the moose have languished in retirement. They're pressed back into service when their perennial adversaries -- criminal mastermind Fearless Leader and bungling spies Boris and Natasha -- launch a cable TV network that turns viewers into zombies. The bulk of the narrative takes place in a live-action landscape in which the three villains morph into humans while Rocky and Bullwinkle become 3-D Industrial Light & Magic animations (with Rocky voiced by a sometimes muffled-sounding June Foray, who created the character).

The film's tone is close to that of the original, but the running jokes about how much/how little America has changed since 1964 are perfunctory and don't get below the surface. The funniest parts are the glimpses of Fearless Leader's zombifying TV shows: the possibly intended irony is that the shows seem more personal (externalizing the obsessive self-images of spies), more visually interesting (with characters moving stiffly in front of cartoonlike strips of sets), and funnier (in the abysmal pointlessness of their jokes) than anything that's actually on TV. Robert De Niro has a good time with the part of Fearless Leader, and ILM doesn't do too badly with Rocky and Bullwinkle, but the most welcome presence in the film is Jonathan Winters, who brings more than a touch of 1964 to his successive cameos. At the Harbour Mall, Holiday, Hoyts Providence Place 16, Showcase, Tri-Boro, and Woonsocket cinemas.
-- Chris Fujiwara