Not so long ago, the trailer for next year’s Minecraft movie seemed to go out of its way to become the single ugliest thing ever witnessed by humankind. Not only did it feature real life actors weaponising the worst facets of their personae, but the CGI – unable to decide whether it wanted to look like the source material or Pixar – fell between the two, giving us creatures that looked as if they were made in the glass boxes that Japanese farmers use to make square watermelons.
However, as awful as the Minecraft trailer looked, the gauntlet has now been thrown down. Deadline has announced that Paramount is making a movie based on the 1990s animated cartoon Rugrats. But what stands to launch the film into the all-time ugly movie hall of fame is this: the Rugrats movie is going to be a live-action/CGI hybrid.
Now, try to cast your mind back to what Rugrats actually looked like. Developed in the late 1980s by the husband-and-wife team of Gábor Csupó and Arlene Klasky, Rugrats was born in an era of non-traditional character design. This was the age of Ren and Stimpy, of Beavis and Butt-Head. An age where even the white-bread mid-century superhero Mighty Mouse could be reimagined as something warped and ironic.
But even compared with these shows, Rugrats was weird to look at. Tommy Pickles, the show’s one-year-old lead character, has a huge and dented head that makes him look like something crossed between an overripe mango and a human brain. His friend Chuckie Finster has raving dots for eyes and hair that looks like someone has kicked a nest of snakes. Even though Tommy’s sister Angelica tried to disguise it with her hair, there’s no denying that her head has the exact dimensions of a pear. This is all by design – during development Csupó said that he wanted his characters to look “strange” rather than “cute” – but this is because the design of the characters was two-dimensional.
That changed in 2021, when Paramount+ launched an all-CGI version of Rugrats. Rendered in three dimensions, the new series was initially off-putting but ultimately fine. It didn’t take long to adjust to the horrors of seeing a testicle-headed baby stagger around looking like a 1996 Windows screensaver. The public may have thought differently – the series had little of the cultural impact of the original – but it was a broadly successful experiment.
However, I put it to you that this was because the 2021 Rugrats series was entirely computer-generated. The babies were CG. The parents were CG. The houses and gardens and streets were CG. The reason that it worked was because you could watch it and quickly assure yourself that it was OK, because everything was uniformly weird.
The problem with Deadline’s announcement, though, is the word “hybrid”. This will be a film where real people will have to share the screen with computer-animated characters. Same as in the Paddington movies, or the Sonic the Hedgehog movies, or the Woody Woodpecker movies. However, those worked because the humans were interacting with animals, not screaming, stumbling babies with voices that make them sound like chain-smoking old ladies and heads that look like cysts.
And yet, presumably, in the Rugrats movie this is exactly what’s going to happen. You might be wondering what the balance will be between live action and CGI. Will there be CGI babies and human adults? Will the entire Pickles family be CGI, and they’ll move into a neighbourhood of normal humans? Honestly, I can’t see it mattering. However it shakes down, this will still be a movie about regular human beings who will be forced to look at a succession of pulsating, blob-headed characters who all to some degree look as though they’ve made several trips through the Brundlefly teleporter.
As much as Deadline is framing this like new news, the truth is that a live-action/CGI Rugrats has been on and off the cards for six years now. The project keeps inching forward and then retreating. This is likely to be because the only feasible story to tell about a world where monstrous computer-generated Rugrat babies crawl around actual people is The Elephant Man. It has to be a story where Tommy Pickles finds himself surrounded by thousands of people who are equally fascinated and horrified by the way he looks, and this miserable existence forces him to question the worth of humanity. This is the only story that this combination can possibly provoke. And you know what? I’d watch it.