Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters
Directed by Matt Maiellaro & Dave Willis
Fans of Cartoon Network’s late night Adult Swim programming recognize “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” as a colossal achievement in surrealist aesthetics. The show zips through bite-sized animated storylines with incessantly zany inspiration, and the credits roll before you can wrap your head around the whole absurd ordeal. Centering on the peculiar adventures of sentient fast food, the average episode builds to a crescendo of silliness by taking various muddled premises to their overwhelmingly bizarre extremes. Always intentionally ridiculous, it’s usually great fun—and, for its core contingency of baked viewers, really profound, man. Not to condescend to the faithfully stoned: “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” is a trip. Which makes its feature-length incarnation, aptly titled Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters, into a befuddling journey.
The outlandish vision of creators Matt Maiellaro and Dave Willis doesn’t translate onto the big screen as anything more than a marathon of episodes, but that’s no failure on their part. Despite the overall nonsensical quality of the plot, Aqua Teen always remains faithful its characters. The writing team tends to follow a rubric that allows audiences to be cheerfully involved in a consistent otherworldly logic. Three roommates (each represented by the edible items that their names suggest) hang out in a quiet neighborhood near the Jersey Shore. Master Shake shamelessly indulges his ego and often winds up dead or otherwise incapacitated; Frylock invents odd sci-fi gadgetry that frequently results in the accidental torturing of cranky and gluttonous neighbor Carl; Meatwad is a lively-but-dumb slab of uncooked beef sporting energy rivaled only by the dancing steaks in Jan Svankmajer’s Lunacy.
That’s right: I just compared Aqua Teen Hunger Force to the work of a legendary Czech animator. The movie doesn’t come anywhere near Svankmajer’s visual genius, but Maiellaro and Willis sport a similarly impressive imagination and bold subversion of storytelling convention. Individual scenes unfold like hardcore Andy Kaufman skits, to the point where it’s never totally clear whether the writers want to seem funny or if they’ve simply lost their minds.
Great television turns into great cinema when the initial setting broadens into fresh and expansive territory, like the epic road trip that yanked Beavis and Butthead out of the suburbs and careening across America. The Aqua Teen movie hardly makes such progress, but nobody involved seems interested in lofty ideals. Maiellaro and Willis, who serve as directors, create a vague conflict involving some mechanical creation wreaking havoc around town. Then they tease us in the (so-called) final act by suggesting that their protagonists have an authentic origin story involving cutting-edge science, a chicken, Egypt and…but why bother?
Curious newbies are encouraged to pick up a season or two on DVD before venturing into the theater, since the fun is enhanced by a familiarity with the show’s motley crew of regulars, including Doctor Weird and the vulgar, two-dimensional Mooninites. But I suspect that caveat won’t stop some uninitiated audiences from checking it out based solely on its recent marketing campaign, which made more headlines last January than anything on the actual show. When two Boston-based artists were hired to post Mooninite artwork around town and inadvertently created a bomb scare, the city was forced to reevaluate its security protocol. (The duo’s press conference, where they insisted on speaking solely about hairstyles, was priceless.) You can talk about that event, dissect it and recognize its social ramifications. The movie, however, will leave you speechless. The raucous opening musical number says it all: “Don’t talk! Watch!” Indeed.
