The Chubbchubbs!

This is another one of these new strange cartoons with not much a storyline and not a lot of jokes but great visuals. The colors in here also are fantastic. It is the visuals, however, that captivate.

We are on some planet in which an Aretha Franklin-alien is on stage singing her famous song and our hero Meeper, the janitor, messes up. He is one-man disaster crew for Franklin, inadvertently turning her into toast a couple of times while she was on stage performing. Meeper, who daydreams of being a singing star, is no singer as we see in his karaoke bit.

Anyway, after getting thrown out of the Ale-E-Inn (get it?) nightclub-bar, he sees a mushroom cloud on the horizon and tries to warn everyone that the "Chubbchubbs" are coming.

When they do, without spoiling anything, we get a big surprise.

I didn't find anything to laugh out loud but I did think this was "cute" and very entertaining, enough to watch it again to see what I missed the first time, where I caught a few quick sights of characters from past sci-fi classics.

Overall, a fun cartoon and an appropriate one to the equally-fun "Men In Black 2" DVD. This is a feature on disc one of the two-disc special edition.

The story is quite simple. A whole bunch of recognizable aliens are at a night club where a singer is belting out RESPECT. A janitor alien thinks he can sing. When the Chubbchubbs show up (monstrous giants with evil intent) the place is deserted, leaving our hero to confront them. But there is a surprise for these guys. It's visually fun and mostly predictable.

This 5 minute, 41 second computer-animated short can be found on the second disc of the 2-DVD special edition of "Men in Black 2". And at such a short running time manages to be much more enjoyable then the main feature. The cartoon deals with an alien janitor named Mupps, and his dreams of singing in the intergalactic bar that he works at. A bar inhabited by a great many recognizable patrons. When he find out the Chubbchubbs are coming, he tries to warn everyone with comical consequences. I won't give away any more except to say this cute short deserved the two awards that it won from the Academy.

My Grade: B+

'The Chubbchubbs!' is a nice animated short that won the Oscar in its category. I have to admit it is pretty funny. There are a lot of references to science-fiction films. Obvious references are Darth Vader, Yoda and Jar Jar Binks from 'Star Wars' and we see E.T. in a bicycle. Harder to find but also there are references to 'Alien', 'The Day the Earth Stood Still' and 'Lost in Space'.

So the short is fun because you can spot the little references, but without those things it is quite good anyway. The animations are very well done, the story has a nice little twist and simply said, it is funny. Most animated short films have the biggest laugh in the end, 'The Chubbchubbs!' is no exception, but there are quite some good moments before that as well.

I thought that the plot of this film was great. The story of a clumsy janitor who had a dream of singing on stage was entertaining to me. I thought that this film had a lot of great humor including when the janitor would fall onto the leader singer. It was interesting how the director's were able to fool the view by making the Chubbchubbs look cute, instead of the being the tough monsters carrying weapons. The animation was excellent and left me wanting to watch this as a feature length film. I especially liked the Star Wars references because I am a big fan of the series. Overall, I think that this was a great film and I give it a 10 out of 10.