Aqua Teen Hunger Force Release Date: April 13, 2007 Starring: Dave Willis, Dana Snyder, Carey Means, Bruce Campbell, Fred Armisen, Chris Kattan Directed by: Matt Maiellaro, Dave Willis
I was recently lunching with a friend who wanted to know what was coming up that was worth seeing, and I mentioned my enthusiasm for this particular film, whose full title is Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters. As it happened, he had never heard of, let alone seen, the Cartoon Network animated series this movie is spun off from. So I tried explaining it to him. "Well," I said, "it's about these three... things that live in Jersey. One's a giant, petulant, unbelievably self-absorbed milkshake, and the other is this raw meatball who's a pain but kind of half-endearingly childlike, and the putatively adult figure of the group is a huge floating container of french fries who has a goatee and is something of a computer whiz... And they have this unbelievably crass Jerseyite neighbor, Carl. And they're sometimes 'menaced' by these incredibly lame early-videogame-design aliens..." It was a little before I began describing the Jerseyite neighbor that I looked up and noticed my friend asking the maitre'd to get me a straitjacket.
Okay, that's an exaggeration. But my friend was genuinely nonplussed, and it made me wonder if this not-quite-90-minute expansion of a deeply weird cartoon whose actual TV episodes clock in at an already head-spinning 12 minutes or so is one of those for-initiates-only deals. I don't think so, if only because the first segment of the movie, a genius parody of the old "let's go out to the lobby" reels they used to show in pre-multiplexes, is the flat-out funniest thing that anybody will ever see this year or maybe next year in any medium, period. After that, we get into a sort-of origin tale of Shake, Meatwad, and Frylock, full of the usual sort-of South-Park-ish verbal abuse and grossout gags, only less on-the-money with its social satire and a whole lot less... linear.
And there's the rub. While some characterize the particular strain of jocularity on display here as "stoner humor," what the weird Aqua Teen disconnects that are here writ larger than ever before most resemble is the anti-logic of the nearly-asleep. It's the stuff of not quite dreams, and it's rendered with such accuracy and hilarity that I am tempted to call Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters the most successful full-on surrealist film since Bunuel and Dali's 1930 L'Age d'Or.
READ MORE: Critic's Choice: Best of 2007 
