South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut (1999) 80m
Those who like to collect SOUTH PARK sound bites for their web pages will have their work cut out for them here. See it with an audience of fans and you'll know what I mean - nearly every line gets a response. It's a rare thing for an animated feature to be more dependent on the script than the animation itself, but that's pretty much the case here. SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER AND UNCUT is the feature version of the hit cable TV series, and is really quite groundbreaking as animated features go, managing to attract the attention of mainstream boxoffice with scrappy, alternative material. Whether it ever screens on television in any form is another matter completely - this is the worst of the TV show's regular offenses taken to the nth degree. Its two most puerile and irritating characters (a flatulent duo named Terrance and Philip) are the catalyst for the plot, which involves the South Park Elementary School kids sneaking into an R-rated movie and emerging with their vocabulary expanded considerably. The mothers of the children - this is trash imitating life, folks - immediately ask for reprisals to be taken against the film. Of course these are the charges that creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have been answering for months, and this is their magnificently infantile response. I won't get into any polemic about how SOUTH PARK is setting a bad example for children, because as long as there have been cartoons there have always been sad individuals unable to grasp the concept of animation being an adult entertainment form, and the argument is pointless before it has even begun. Nuff said.
SOUTH PARK is a riot (one line about menstruation kept me laughing for over a minute) but, as is usually the case, its humor is an acquired taste and it does help if you are familiar with the characters. The pretext for getting all the children suddenly swearing is a logical one, given the absence of R-rated language in the television series (even though we all knew they were capable of it). For the first half hour it's funny, but then too much weight is placed on this one idea as the film's central gag. As is often the case with this sort of thing, the initial shock/humor of seeing the grade-schoolers using coarse language becomes routine with overuse. It wouldn't have been self-censoring of Parker and Stone to have edited quite a bit of the 'R' language out, especially in the film's second half. There would have been enough concessions included for series followers to compensate: Kenny's weekly death scene goes beyond the show's standard cut-out animation style into a fluid, three-dimensional afterlife; Cartman gets a reprise of his well-known pejorative ditty about Kyle's mother; there's some truly appalling and tasteless attacks on Saddam Hussein (but he deserves it, the jerk); and one unexpected semi-serious moment involving Kenny near the film's conclusion (which includes a line from BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD creator Mike Judge). And then of course there are the songs. As tiresome as these may seem in the Disney films and their imitators (which always slow the plot down with some sappy number in the hopes of netting an Oscar), in SOUTH PARK they are suitably short, funny and punchy, including a LES MISERABLES spoof and a zinger directed at those introspective, soul-searching ballad-monologues (featuring Satan). Surprisingly the songs are pretty good (My favorites would be the opening track and 'Just Say Mm'Kay'). It's too bad they won't be nominated for any Oscars though. I would have loved to have seen the Terrance and Philip number performed at the Academy Awards.
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