Anybody remember this one? It was the last gasp of the 90s/early 2000s Warner Bros. Feature Animation division, but it actually holds up pretty well on a rewatch. True, it's technically a live-action/animation combo, but the main story is all animated, only crossing over into the live-action footage a couple times. And it's a little dated at points (Kid Rock and his band show up as animated versions of themselves, there's a brief bullet-time bit in the finale), but the majority of the film is still very enjoyable. Laundry list!:
-Half the fun of the movie is seeing how the inner workings of the body are made into "The City of Frank": the stomach is the airport, gangsters hang out in the sweat gland of the armpit, and so on. The other half is seeing how traditional buddy-cop tropes get a new spin from this setting: Jones can disguise himself as a criminal simply by rearranging his cell makeup (or something like that), he gripes that he got a "college boy" for a new partner when Drix mentions that he was developed at the University of Chicago, and the villain Thrax's plan seems like the microbiological version of a "blow up the city" plot in countless action movies.
-The animation itself is bright, colorful and very well done; not quite up to the level of Disney, but pretty close. The voicework is also solid all the way through. Chris Rock is a natural fit for the disgruntled "loose cannon cop who doesn't play by the rules" title character, David Hyde-Pierce is perfectly stuffy and whitebread as Drix, Laurence Fishburne gets to loosen up and almost be *funky* as Thrax, William Shatner is hammy fun as the duplicitous Mayor Phlegming, and even Brandy shines as love interest Leah. Ron Howard also has an amusing cameo as Shatner's mayoral adversary in a pitch-perfect parody of political ads.
-Seriously, Thrax is probably one of my favorite non-Disney animated villains. His design and animation are fantastic, Fishburne is clearly having a blast doing the voice, gets a truly gruesome demise, and he has some of the best lines: "E-bo-la? Lemme tell you something about e-bo-la. Ebola is a case of DANDRUFF compared to me!" Or the great moment where he dips into Frank's messed-up subconscious for a moment and is wigged out: "This cat was sick before I even got here!"
-Actually, the weakest stuff is probably the live-action footage directed by the Farrelly Brothers. Bill Murray, much as I love him, seems miscast as the slovenly Frank, and the gross-out stuff is much funnier inside the body where it's not real. Seeing Bill mack on an egg that has been in the mouth of a chimp and on the floor is just... bleh.
So yeah, it's no Iron Giant or even Cats Don't Dance, but it sure as hell beats Quest for Camelot. Thoughts?
