Weird Wednesdays: Foodfight!

This screening was part of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series. For upcoming shows, click here.

Foodfight! is many things to many people. It's a blatant attempt to rip off Toy Story, one of the worst films of all time, and most recently a Weird Wednesday presentation at the Alamo Drafthouse. 

To me it’s a dire warning about the future of cinema. But, let’s put a pin in that for now. 

If you’re a fan of legendarily bad movies, Foodfight! by Lawrence Kasanoff is definitely on the Mount Rushmore of objects of cinematic ridicule.  The amount of content created on the back of this direct-to-DVD oddity is staggering. The friendly masochists of the bad movie blogosphere consumed Foodfight! enthusiastically, gobbling it right up like so much holiday stuffing. The Flop House podcast covered it. The We Hate Movies podcast hated on it. A full length documentary devoted to the infamously disastrous production is also waiting for the morbidly curious on YouTube. 

The creators allegedly blew through all their funding, and they distributed this CGI animated dreck only after claiming the original hard drives had been allegedly stolen, which, from a root cause analysis perspective, is an excuse on par with “the dog ate my homework.”

This is the part where I would usually provide some kind of plot information for context. I’m going to skip that today. Firstly, this film defies context. It also defies analysis, as its terribleness announces itself from the first frame, and that’s assuming its reputation did not precede it. Secondly, the plot is copied whole cloth from Casablanca. 

Foodfight!’s premise is so simple on paper it’s easy to see how it could succeed.  A cartoon about a grocery store that comes to life at night, turning into a city full of brand mascots, some real, some imagined. If there's a reason recent licensed movies like Barbie, Wreck-It Ralph, and The Lego Movie have been effective it's mostly because the products involved are universally familiar. A film maker or audience member brings their own experience and goodwill toward the brand into the theater with them. A rip-off of Casablanca starring a bunch of cartoon brand mascots seems like something that could write itself, but more on that in a moment. 

Casablanca seems to be some kind of catnip for film auteurs with more funding than sense, and other bad film offenders that liberally borrow from the Bogart classic include Barb Wire, Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, and Blackbird (yes, the one with Michael Flatley of Riverdance fame.) My educated guess would be that when producers copy the sultry film noir trappings of Casablanca they believe it will somehow transfer some proper grown-up movie vibes to a project that lacks mature writing or direction. 

There is also a school of thought that a kids movie should have references that an adult can latch onto so they won’t be completely bored when escorting kids to the movies. The producers of Foodfight! shouldn’t have bothered. The final product is the kind of thing found at the bottom of a DVD bin for witless parents to put on when unlucky kids need a video babysitter. I say unlucky because anyone who actually paid attention to Foodfight! for its content would notice a bunch of stuff inappropriate for anyone of any age.

The cast is a worthy roster if one was looking to cast a CGI animated kids movie of any stripe - at least in the mid-2000s. Charlie Sheen is at his early 2000s peak, pre-rehab and has a gravelly delivery ideal for a grisled dog detective. Eva Longoria hams it up as a fascist brand X product icon, although she tends to play it a bit like a generic evil witch. Hillary Duff and Wayne Brady are serviceable in their respective roles as love interest and best squirrel friend. Larry Miller as a chocolate cereal vampire bat mascot was a standout, though he is funny more so out of context, as he doesn’t know what movie he is in and he does not care. Yet, this points to another huge flaw: there is no consistent direction to any of the voice cast. Veteran voice performers like Cloris Leachman and Robert Costanzo show up and do their roles, but nothing more, nothing less. This leaves everything feeling flattened out, generic. This is all sounding familiar. 

Most reviews of Foodfight! highlight the abysmal computer animation, and all I can add is that this is a uniquely unpleasant film to watch. There is no effort to make animal characters look like they have fur; the best the software can manage is misshapen or strangely greasy or rubbery. The movement of the weasel character is downright unnerving, and most of the other character movements seem to be stock motion capture animations that are available online - much cheaper than hiring a mocap performer or an animator to create bespoke animation. Remember that for later.

As terrible as the animation and the character designs are, the songs are unacceptable even as a temp track. The music goes hand in hand with the lazy writing. The original songs sound like a generic copy of songs heard in other films. The lyrics merely describe what you are seeing on the screen. For example, if the daredevil squirrel is rescuing the dog detective, you’ll get lyrics like “best friends rescue each other!” That may not be verbatim from the movie, but you get the idea. I’m not going to go back and check. I’m not going to watch this again, if I don’t have to. 

So what happens when all these strikes are tallied up? Foodfight!, released in 2012 is a terrifying look at our all-digital AI driven film future. It’s a film pieced together from stock models distorted enough to avoid copyright infringement. Animations and character models are copied and pasted with abandon and become monstrous abominations in the process. The songs are cobbled together and seem vaguely similar to something one might hear in a Pixar movie but are devoid of any real inspiration. The script is equally devoid of anything truly new or original, and, for all intents and purposes, it's a copy and paste rewrite of another more popular story with obvious jokes about cartoon animals and advertising slogans peppered in. The performances lack any real depth, and all the comedy stems from the awkward unpleasantness of the presentation and not any real effort on the part of the filmmakers. In effect, so-called AI content generation simply automates all the tools that the Foodfight! producers abused in their apathy.

Is Foodfight! still fun? Sure. It’s a bad movie, and bad movies are fun because they are silly and awkward in their execution, and everyone makes mistakes, and, as long as it’s not mean-spirited, sometimes half the fun of spectating is the possibility of a spectacular wipeout.

But, that sword cuts both ways, and the same things that make Foodfight! into an outsider art curiosity also demonstrate the dangers of misusing technology for the sake of a quick buck. 

I’m not here to bum anyone out.  I’m merely the messenger, playing the role of the ghost of Christmas future, if you will. In this scenario, it’s the scene near the final act of A Christmas Carol, and I’m standing over an Ebenezer Scrooge that represents a gestalt of all tech mogul wannabes and Hollywood executives. This Scrooge delivers his famous line, “Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?” And I, in my cool cloak, point toward a nearby snowbank on the cold cemetery grounds, and, among the tombstones, there is a comically large DVD slipcase of Foodfight! sticking out of the ground topped with snow. A warning to Sam Altman and all the other Brand X Scrooges out there of what may be if they don’t change their ways.

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