I don’t think it’s at all riff-able due to the fact that the movie barely takes any time to catch its figurative breath, but if you’re looking for bad animated movies, I can recommend the cinematic disaster that is Foodfight! Yes, with the exclamation point and everything.
I remember seeing an article in Newsweek on the movie about a decade before it finally got released, and even then the premise, where mascots for supermarket brands come to life when the grocery stores closed, struck me as completely bizarre. The article boasted about its use of actual name brands, blending product placement and entertainment in such a way that it felt utterly sinister to teenage me. So when the trailers for it finally popped up online prior to its eventual 2012 release, I remember having a flashback, like “wait… I know about this… it can’t be… oh no.”
This film… is awful. The jokes do not land. The whole film is overtly sexual and crass in a way that becomes disgusting given the uncanny character designs. From an animation standpoint, most of the models don’t have their eyeballs rigged separate from the main mesh of their model, so they always stare straight ahead, and many of them don’t blink. There’s attempts at squash-and-stretch where you can almost see the polygons used for the models reaching their absolute limit, almost as if the vertices (that’s the points that connect the polygons that make up a 3D model) are about to snap and break. Many characters are motion captured, poorly, and their fingers are often splayed out as they would be when in a T-pose. Their hands are almost always in that pose, never at rest, only making gestures when absolutely necessary. And that’s not even touching on the poor writing, pacing, dialog, and stereotypes that people found plenty offensive a decade ago. It’s an ugly film through and through and is baffling to watch. So naturally I’ve seen it like 12 times.
The production itself is interesting because they had nearly completed the original cut of the film in the early 2000’s when their studio was robbed, with the computers that held the original files never to be seen again, and of course, nobody had anything backed up outside of the studio, so they had to start from scratch. The film had a high turnover rate for animators, many of them only working a couple of months before quitting. Eventually the film’s rights were auctioned off after the studio defaulted on a loan and it was squirted out onto DVD. The cast is full of known names; Charlie Sheen, Hillary Duff, Wayne Brady, Eva Longoria, Chris Kattan, Harvey Fierstein, Ed Asner and Christopher Lloyd (who I feel like his agent just really hated him for a period of time because he showed up in some absolute garbage for almost two decades) all show up in this thing and it is baffling. I remember I had gone to the theater with a friend to see Wreck-It Ralph, loving it, and then coming home and learning that Foodfight! had leaked online and watching that in a stream with a rowdy chatroom, and it was like a quality whiplash. At one point there was a 24/7 Livestream of the film running for a while run by an account called Charliesheendog and it’s responsible for me having seen this movie as many times as I have. This film wanted to be the next Toy Story. Instead, it ended up being straight-up dog garbage.
I bought this movie for a friend of mine for her birthday as a surprise and as soon as she got it, she knew I was the one who sent it. Because that’s the kind of friend I am.
