Movie Log: Space Chimps

A week ago, my family had most of a day free and wanted to do something together. It wasn't quite warm enough to go to the waterpark at Land of Make-Believe, which would have been our first preference, so we went to lunch at a Dave & Busters and then saw Space Chimps.

Space Chimps, I'm surprised to be able to say, is not nearly as bad as you would expect. Oh, the plot is silly and old-fashioned, the kind of thing that seemed old and laughable when I was seven. And the aliens have some of the silliest, oddest designs that I've ever seen -- their world is a cross between Standard Star Trek Alien Desert and Teletubbies Garish Primary. And the ostensible villain isn't frightening, or plausible, or anything more than pathetic -- he's literally the mean old man who lives on the edge of town.

But the script was surprisingly witty, full of jokes that we (and the rest of the audience) laughed honestly at. Most of those jokes were even based in the actual characters. Oh, sure, they were barely two-dimensional characters -- I'm not claiming any more than that -- but the jokes flowed out of their generic sitcom tics and foibles, instead of being shoved in wherever they fit.

Space Chimps felt like nothing so much as an old Filmation script, found in the back of a drawer when someone's office got cleaned out, that then had its dialogue punched up by a top-rank contemporary sitcom writer and was animated, on a middling but acceptable budget, by two entirely different teams: solid veterans on the chimps and humans, and a crew of game but inexperienced folks speaking an entirely different language for the alien world and its inhabitants.

Space Chimps is not good, in any sense of the word. But it's quite funny, and unexpectedly entertaining. Given the dire state of family animation -- I'm afraid I'll be seeing Fly Me To the Moon sooner than I'd prefer (which would be never) -- it counts as a bloop single.