platonism's Full Review: Ren & Stimpy Show - The Complete First and Second ...
As strange as it may sound, I had never seen a single episode of The Ren & Stimpy Show before buying this 3-DVD set. I had not been living on another planet... but in another country; thus, I did not have access to channels like Nickelodeon or MTV. Viewers familiar with the show might wonder why I chose to shell out big dollars for a controversial series about which I knew very little. Three of its aspects piqued my curiosity: 1) I was surprised to learn that Ren & Stimpy's creator, John Kricfalusi (henceforth John K.), was actually born in Chicoutimi, Quebec, and thus a compatriot of mine; 2) the set featured episodes from the first two (and reportedly best) seasons; 3) what I had read about its aesthetic merits (the settings and animation, the influence of major figures like Chuck Jones and Ted Avery, the unique use of music, etc.) convinced me to give it a try.
The Ren & Stimpy Show was bought by Nickelodeon in 1991 after having been turned down by Fox, ABC and NBC. Both characters were created separately by John K. and his Spumco team, but brought together on the suggestion of a friend. Ren is an edgy, somewhat psychotic Chihuahua (John K. voiced Ren himself for two years), while Stimpy (voiced by Billy West) is a big cat whose intelligence is... lacking. The show's history is tumultuous: after a very successful first year and a half, John K. was fired and Nickelodeon's own studio, Games Animation, took up the production duties. The show continued for a few more seasons, but its popularity dwindled and Nickelodeon canned it in 1995. John K. returned to his characters in 2003 for a series of adult-oriented cartoons.
About the 3-DVD set
One criticism has often been levelled against this set since its October 12 release (2004): while the cover alleges that only uncut versions have been included, several episodes are in fact censored; this is made clear by occasional fade-ins/outs in these specific cartoons. Purists were understandably irked upon learning about these problems. For newcomers like myself, this is not of much importance - I don't have previous versions to compare this release to, and the actual cuts are (from most accounts) minor. Meanwhile, even if it is not quite as exhaustive as it pretends to be, the set offers excellent value for its price, with nearly seven hours of strange, often brilliant cartoons. All in all, thirty-two cartoons are included here, with great image quality.
The set also has some bonus features. The 12-minute "Ren & Stimpy: In the Beginning" featurette gives a nice overview of the show's origins and its inner workings. Viewers can also find a series of 77 drawings and a pencil test for the episode Sven Hoek. The original Spumco team has recorded audio commentaries for six of the cartoons – while not as in-depth as they could have been, these commentaries are still insightful, as the creators sometimes point out who was responsible for this or that segment; John K. shares many thoughts on Spumco's heated relationship with the Nickelodeon network. Admittedly, the extras are fairly underwhelming and there should have been more.
Remarks on the artistry of these unique cartoons
Instead of laboriously going through the entire list of the cartoons included on the three DVDs, I'll comment on some of the most significant themes, images and films of the whole set (that is, according to my own humble opinion). With so many films, many will inevitably be left out. But… here we go.
Like a lot of classic Looney Tunes short films, the Ren & Stimpy cartoons are rarely driven by a clearly-defined narrative; some cartoons almost eschew narrative altogether. Just as they remain supremely themselves, Ren and Stimpy are cartoon actors whose parts depend on the themes and settings chosen by the creators. [A Looney Tunes equivalent would by Daffy Duck, who teamed-up with (or faced) a plethora of characters in wildly different genres throughout his career (especially when he was directed by Chuck Jones).] Several elements or characters do recur throughout the series: as John K. says in the featurette, the strong personalities of the characters are such that they enable endless variations from one film to another.
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These cartoons walk on the fine line between children and adult-oriented material. Many point to the cruder of the jokes to stress this, but to me the films' most unsettling moments involve Ren's perpetual struggle to contain himself and keep his sanity. The conveniently named Space Madness - the one with the "history eraser button" - has several startling sequences (including the justly famous "soap eating" scene). This cartoon is not so much John K.'s take on 1950s SF as it is one of his most mesmerizing experiments in horror and the fantastic. Near the end of Sven Hoek, Ren's extraordinary tirade is just as brutal and powerful.
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Pretty much all commercial cartoons keep some ties with narrative, but this narrative tradition has multiple layers - while some series rely a lot on continuous plotlines and readily understandable stories, others veer away from this and verge on the abstract, with little or no reference to narrative conventions. A cartoon like the exceptionally bizarre Black Hole has a story reduced to its purest expression: the two protagonists are sucked into a black hole and try to find their way out. Throughout their adventure, their appearance changes every few seconds, and their chance encounters are straight out of an Andre Breton book or a Salvador Dali painting. In two hilarious episodes (Robin Hoek and The Littlest Giant), Ren dreams a story recounted with difficulty by Stimpy, and adjusts the action to Stimpy's confused reading. In that vein, many episodes progress in a dreamlike way, chaotically bringing about a slew of symbols and mysteries that become more and more expressive on repeated viewings. The images slowly enter the viewer's mind, and reason cannot make sense of them all.
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John K.'s disregard for more conventional canons of cartoon beauty does not mean that Ren & Stimpy episodes are not interesting to look at. On the contrary. Spumco did not attempt to woo their audiences with illusionistic, life-like images, but chose to express themselves through vivid, markedly anti-realist lens. The sheer amount of different facial expressions in the series is justly celebrated: both characters live extended ranges of emotions in short amounts of time (the stupendous Stimpy's Invention, in which Stimpy attempts to build a "happy helmet" to make the edgy Ren perpetually happy, might be the most revealing and radical episode in that regard - Ren goes from one extreme to another). They are shown from multiple angles, and the backgrounds are often windows into their souls. The pilot Big House Blues (presented here both in its cut and uncut versions) is also a tremendous piece of stream-of-consciousness animation. The backgrounds are almost completely abstracted as the characters frantically go through successive adventures.
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One of the most interesting things about the boxed set, for me, is that the episodes are very hard to describe and must simply be experienced. And even after the pure visceral power has left its mark on the viewer, there is still more to discover. While the boxed set has a few shortcomings - the main ones being the false advertising (some cartoons are actually censored, unlike what is stated on the cover) and the overall lack of extras -, I wholeheartedly recommend it to viewers with a taste for off-the-wall cartoons and decidedly subversive "kid entertainment".
Parental Advisory: Explicit Content. Warning: This program is recommended for mature audiences only. It contains adult language and situations. You ee...More at HotMovieSale.com
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