The Rugrats Movie

These days it seems that every animated kids show gets a (hastily made) big screen counterpart and in fairness, most of these shows are barely passable as TV entertainment, let alone enough to stretch to feature length. On TV, Rugrats is something of a cult, in the sense that it's watched by stoners and the unemployed as much as the under 8's. Unsurprisingly, the film version did well enough to spawn several sequels, even less surprising when it seems as though the animation quality is only fractionally improved over that used on the small screen. Unlike many of the other shows to go big screen, the producers of Rugrats did at least have enough faith in resident composer Mark Mothersbaugh to give him the job of providing the score. The Rugrats theme just goes to show what you can do with a cheap keyboard and I mean that in no disparaging way, it's a funky little tune that's note perfect for the show and makes numerous appearances during the movie score, albeit often augmented with full orchestra and even as an action motif during the inspiringly titled The Big Chase.

As can be gathered by relating the number of tracks to the total time, the music is generally conceived in very brief cues, with a third running under a minute and most between one and two minutes. The net result is of course a pretty disjointed album, but then this is the kind of film where musical stylistic continuity isn't of paramount importance. Many of the early cues sound like they could be from the TV series, with minimal orchestra and a smaller scale, but once the 'adventure' begins, things pick up and become larger in scope. Mothersbaugh has quite a bit of fun with amusing samples which are randomly blobbed atop the music. Most are just silly noises, but some are actually used instrumentally, notably the tracks dealing with the monkeys where are dizzy carnival atmosphere is conjured up, not entirely unlike James Horner's Jumanji, although never quite as chaotic.

The film features a few spoofs (or rather crudely animated versions) of other films, although the music only suggests this on a couple of occasions with Williams' Raider's March and a few notes from Also Sprach Zarathustra by Strauss for 2001. I'm guessing that using Alex North's score would have gone above the kids' heads. Mind you, how many 8 year olds do you know who have even heard of 2001, let alone seen it? Much like Mothersbaugh's score for the dismal Rocky and Bullwinkle movie, the score is hard to recommend because it doesn't have much consistency of style and while it's fun at the time, there isn't much to remember afterwards aside from the main theme and snippets of other music. Still, if like me you pay only a couple of pounds for it second hand, then it's too much fun to be considered a bad investment.