DVD REVIEW: THE DRAWN TOGETHER MOVIE: THE MOVIE! (VERY NSFW)

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AMAZON: CLICK
HERE
STUDIO: Comedy Central
MSRP: $16.49
RATED: Not rated
RUNNING
TIME: 70 minutes
SPECIAL
FEATURES:
– Drawn Together: True Confessionals
– Drawn Together: The Legacy
– Anatomy of an Animated Sex Scene
– Re-Animating Drawn Together: From the Small Screen to the Slightly Bigger Screen
– DIY 3D Glasses
– Deleted Scenes
– Drawn Together Minisodes
– Audio Commentary by Matt Silverstein, Dave Jeser, Jordan Young and Kurt Vanzo

The
Pitch

It’s got more animated dicks
than that Lil Bush
cartoon.

The Humans

Adam Carolla (Spanky Ham), Jess Harnell (Captain Hero), Abbey McBride (Ling-Ling), Jack Plotnick (Xandir P. Whifflebottom), Tara Strong (Princess Clara, Toot Braunstein), Cree Summer (Foxxy Love, Suck My Taint Girl), James Arnold Taylor (Wooldoor Sockbat, Jew Producer), Vernon Wells (Network Head)

The Nutshell

The filthiest cartoon no longer on TV returns in this exponentially filtihier movie where the Drawn Together gang finally realize that they’ve been canceled.  When a vengeful network TV exec with a personal grudge against them all sends I.S.R.A.E.L., a killer robot that erases any toon right off the page, the DT gang has to embark on a journey to justify their existence and possibly even get their show back.  Along the way, there are about a million fart jokes and dick jokes, cursing every other word and 3D sex acts.  And that’s just the stuff I can mention on a family website. 

The Lowdown

I’m looking forward to the day, weeks, months or years from now, when some harried parent goes to a Best Buy or Wal-Mart or wherever they have a DVD bargain bin and grabs this thing for her screaming anklebiter because it’s the first cartoon she sees that’s cheap and then shits herself later when she realizes what her kid is watching.  Because Drawn Together was a despicable, loathsome, mysoginistic, pornographic and apallingly offensive cartoon during its run on Comedy Central (which is why I was a fan).  But it’s nothing compared to its movie.  All the gloves, and I mean all of them are off here.  No censors. no restraint, no problem.  You name the bad, this movie has got it.  But it’s also got a shload of laughs.

The basic premise of the show was that there were eight cartoon characters that were cheap knockoffs or parodies of more familiar cartoons living together in a reality television setting, a la Big Brother, and the misadventures they got into every episode.  The characters are (via Wikipedia):

• Princess Clara: A pampered, hyper-religious, and racist princess who is a parody of Disney princesses such as Ariel from The Little Mermaid and Belle from Beauty and the Breast.
  

• Wooldoor Jebediah Sockbat: A bizarre children’s show character in the mold of SpongeBob SquarePants or Stimpy who displays many of the typical reality-defying behaviors of Looney Tunes characters.

• Foxxy Love: A sharp-tongued ghetto-parody of Valerie Brown from Josie and the Pussycats, she is a promiscuous mystery-solving musician. Her name is an amalgam of 1970s blaxploitation characters Foxy Brown and Christy Love.

• Toot Braunstein: An overweight alcoholic sex symbol from the 1920s reminiscent of Betty Boop. Toot demands to be the center of attention, cuts herself with razor blades and excessively eats when depressed, and often instigates conflict in the house.

• Ling-Ling: A homicidal spoof of Pikachu from the Pokémon franchise, who battles using various supernatural powers/abilities (reminiscent of anime) and speaks in pseudo-Japanese gibberish (or “Japorean”, as Ling-Ling’s voice Abbey McBride calls it) with English subtitles.

• Xandir P. Wifflebottom: A hypersensitive, homosexual, overemotional, and effeminate parody of video game heroes like Link from The Legend of Zelda series. The princess he was trying to rescue strongly resembles Princess Zelda in her adult form. Xandir also wears a protective shoulder plate similar to Cloud Strife of Final Fantasy.

• Spanky Ham: A sex-obsessed, toilet humored, obnoxious parody of Internet Flash cartoon characters.

• Captain Leslie Hero: A chauvinistic, perverted, antiheroic, and lecherous parody of Superman and other superheroes, with a visual style taken from the cartoons of Bruce Timm and Max Fleischer.

The show was unceremoniously canceled, and the premise of the movie is that the DT gang were never told.  So they continue going about their miscreant daily lives in utter ignorant bliss, although their boss, Jew Producer, would occasionally stop by to get them to indulge in made up challenges for worthless prizes merely to get himself off.  In this case it’s is stomping on puppies and kittens for JP’s immediate sexual self-gratification.  But when Foxxy gets suspicious, especially when she isn’t censored after saying a litany of curse words, she investigates and discovers that they were canceled quite a while ago without ever knowing it. 

Furthermore, Network Head (Vernon Wells.  That’s right: Vernon Friggin’ Wells), the exec who canceled their show, sends a murderous robot, I.S.R.A.E.L. to erase them.  It seems that a Drawn Together billboard is responsible for his wife and daughter’s car crash and his subsequent disfigurement; and he swore revenge.  From there, the plot, although definitely going from Point A to Point B, frequently takes asides that the show is known for doing, skewering all things popular culture under the sun.  The gags are far too numerous to list, but they involve things like Hero dragging along a dead girlfriend for most of the show, Toot being knocked up with Barney Rubble’s love child, a horrible realization by Clara about her status in her kingdom, and a quest by the gang to Make A Point Land, where dinosaurs have packages the size of Saturn V rockets among other things. 

This is a patently offensive toon flick.  If you didn’t like the show or didn’t care about it before, this won’t change your mind.  In fact, it’ll probably entrench you further in your opinion of the show.  But for fans of Drawn Together, this is the version of the show you’ve probably been waiting for, no limits on the nudity, cursing and general depravity.  But the show also has a funny storyline and the gags are coming a mile a minute.  A couple of them had me laughing out loud.  The movie also echoes some of the anger of the producers at the treatment the show received during its run and ultimately at its cancellation.  They threw absolutely everything into this movie and if this is the last hurrah of Drawn Together, they went out with a bang.

The Package

The movie and the sound are both fine.  No complaints on the animation.  In fact, it’s a little too graphic at times.  They also included a couple of 3D scenes, but didn’t bother with the glasses.  In terms of special features, the disc is also surprisingly loaded.  There are several featurettes and interviews such as Drawn Together: True Confessionals and Drawn Together: The Legacy, where they have testimonials from most of the cast including Adam Carolla and Cree Summer about their experiences on the show and creating the characters.   Anatomy of an Animated Sex Scene runs about five minutes and continues the sit-down type of interview with the actors, Tara Strong and Cree Summer, involved in voicing the animated sex scene depicted in the show. 

Re-Animating Drawn Together: From the Small Screen to the Slightly Bigger Screen is a 10-minute piece on the production of the movie with the exec producers and animators.  DIY 3D Glasses is a quickie tutorial on how to make your own 3D glasses.  Of course, most of the footage includes a pair of not-unatttractive real life breasts.  There are eight minutes of deleted scenes, some of them in very simple B&W animation.  There are also eight minisodes on the main characters, which give a little more background about them and are hosed by Jew Producer.  These run about four or five minutes each.  A commentary by Matt Silverstein, Dave Jeser, Jordan Young and Kurt Vanzo round out the offerings.