Inexplicable Movie Review: Why Rugrats sucks

Rugrats sucks, so a picture from a good cartoon of the era instead.

One of my past professions, substitute teaching, gave me plenty of time to watch lots of bad movies and to critique them against better movies. This is really far less fascinating than it sounds, and I'm sure it sounds less than fascinating to begin with.

Anyway, children's movies are a fairly common occurrence, since I was subbing for teenagers and tweens. And lately, that has made me evaluate why Rugrats really, really sucks as compared to a classic Disney movie, like Pinocchio. This applies even if said Disney classic is in Spanish. There is a certain quality and wit to a classic Disney movie, a basic level of competence, that is just not present in all this modern cartoon crap.

Let's get specific and talk about Rugrats in Paris: The Movie, which is a lovingly redundant title for a crass and unsophisticated movie. Pretty much all of the humor derives from tired jokes (Making fun of Euro-Disney, ha, gold Jerry!) and the babies throwing up and shitting themselves. Just remember this next time you see a movie like The Hammer get an R.

I never really understood the appeal of Rugrats. It came out when I was just a bit too old for it, so that could be one reason. While it's clearly a step above absolute tripe / little kid programming like Barney and Lamb Chop's Sing Along, I think it is clearly a rung below Doug. I vaguely recall my sister, who is four years younger than I am, being pretty into Rugrats.

Anyway, their Paris movie is pretty god damn awful. I'm not sure why, but I was showing it for middle school French classes, even though there isn't that much French in the movie. I can understand not wanting to show, say, Les Mis to sixth graders, since that movie has a bunch of torture scenes. But there has to be a better compromise movie than Paris Rugrats. Why not an adaptation of Le Petit Prince or Asterix? Both are more faithful to the French language than Rugrats, or the other bizarre, tangential French movie I had to watch, Passport to Paris starring the Olsen twins.

If you sincerely care, the plot of the movie revolves around the babies acting like babies, and Chuckie trying to hook his dad up with a new mom. Somehow, Angelica gets involved, and things get stupid and not funny. I highly recommend the film if you're trying to fall asleep, because I almost did at several points.

The picture from an actual good Nickelodeon show is from this Tumblr site.