But the original cartoons are pretty much lacking in the pathos or tenderness which have played so crucial a part in the adult appeal of the really successful animated films of recent years, and the film is too. Fesser has indeed captured the spirit and flavor of the original and his genuine affection for these characters and their world bounces off the screen. It’s knockabout schoolboy-ish fare which rarely depends on knowing irony for its effects, and which is a little bit sexist, though reinvigorated by the smart use of technology.
More seaside postcard than South Park, the humor is appealingly old-fashioned. Many of these pleasures are satirical Spanish references - to Spanish reality TV, for example, or even to the failed 1981 coup d’etat - which will fly over the heads of non-Spanish viewers, as will the constant punning, which will make subtitlers sweat. The pages of a Mortadelo and Filemon comic book are packed with detail, verbal wit, and visual invention, and on screen this translates into a hyperactivity and breathlessness which is at times almost exhausting: it’s the kind of viewing experience designed to deliver new visual pleasures on a second viewing as the viewer refocuses on the background. Professor Bacterio (all characters are visually faithful recreations of the originals) has invented a serum called Reversicine, intended to transform Mortadelo and Filemon into intelligent beings, but Tronchamulas is accidentally injected with it, whereon he becomes gentle and baby-like, also revealing that he is Jimmy’s cousin.
Further bad news arrives in the form of the monstrous Tronchamulas ( Victor Monigote), a violent, three-ton criminal who wishes to take revenge on Filemon by doing a terrible, nameless “something” to him. When Jimmy steals a safe from the TIA (not CIA) building, the Superintendent ( Mariano Venancio) instructs our heroes to recover it. Brainless, but an expert in disguise, Mortadelo ( Karra Elejalde) and his temperamental boss work for a criminal investigation agency, under threat from a dastardly Marty Feldman lookalike called “Jimmy el Cachondo” ( Gabriel Chame), loosely translatable as “Jimmy the Joker”. We’re returned to the ramshackle, comically violent, malfunctioning gadget-filled world they normally inhabit, something like a mash-up between Looney Tunes and Wallace and Gromit. Early scenes portray an entertainingly hi-tech, glossy variation on classic M & F slapstick motifs before it’s revealed that it’s all been a dream by Filemon ( Janfri Topera).
0 kommentar(er)
