Cartoon flick not just Puff

Dennis Piszkiewicz

I really did not want to see “The Powerpuff Girls Movie,” but my

son Andy did and I owed him one.

If you have young children and cable television, you already know

that this film is based on the Cartoon Network’s animated series of

the same name. It features three pre-school girls with the powers of

superheroes. I doubted that the producers could stretch the half-hour

television program to a full-length feature or get their low-budget

animation to look anything other than cheap on the big screen.

Surprise. This movie is better -- much better -- than I expected. The

story begins when Professor Utonium decides to create three little

girls by using the well-known formula of sugar and spice and

everything nice, but he accidentally adds a splash of “Chemical X” to

the mix.

The Professor gets his three little girls, but unexpectedly they

have superpowers.

What makes “The Powerpuff Girls Movie” a delight, though, is the

artwork. The first scenes are sketched in a 1950s style and colored

in bland pastels. The characters, the Professor and the Powerpuff

Girls, are rendered in simple straight and curved lines. About a

third of the way into the movie, as the plot begins to thicken, the

lines of backgrounds and characters become more complex, the colors

become darker and bolder. When I noticed the change, I thought, “This

is interesting.” Deeper into the story, I watched the images become

wonderfully bizarre, and I thought, “Wow! What were they thinking?”

Then when I saw the heroines sitting on an asteroid in a skyscape

that reminded me of scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi classic

“2001: A Space Odyssey,” I began wondering, “What were they smoking?”

My son Andy thought it was great, and I think the best parts were

lost on the kids. Take your children to see it, and leave at home

your notions of what a kids’ movie should be like.

A final note: “The Powerpuff Girls Movie comes with a bonus. The

feature is preceded by a cartoon short titled “Chicken Scratch,”

starring Dexter of Cartoon Network’s “Dexter’s Laboratory” series.

Dexter has the misfortune of waking one morning with chicken pox and

he must decide whether to scratch or not to scratch.

This short has lots of laughs and, like the feature, marvelously

imaginative artwork.

* DENNIS PISZKIEWICZ is a Laguna Beach resident.