Boxing Briefs: CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS: THE FIRST EPIC MOVIE

DreamWorks Animation slid back from its recent heights of Pandas, Penguins, and Dragons to wallow in bad habit snark scripts and starry casts for Trolls and The Boss Baby, but now they’ve managed to reignite a fleeting creative spark by getting below the lowest common denominator. Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie is the sort of entertainment I might’ve enjoyed much more if I was still in the target demographic, but which has a goofy charm that’s easy to appreciate. Directed by Dave Soren (Turbo), the production is a cartoon in the best and most complete sense of the word: completely freed from the bonds of narrative, physical, and logical sense. It’s about two elementary-school-aged boys (voiced by Kevin Hart and Thomas Middleditch) who crack themselves up writing comic books about their own invented superhero: Captain Underpants, a rotund, egg-shaped doofus who flies around in just a cape and big white briefs. Alas, they don’t keep their creativity on the page, reveling in their status as the school’s best and most prolific pranksters. Running afoul of their tyrannical principal (Ed Helms) one too many times, their last-ditch effort to avoid drastic punishment (separate classrooms, the horror!) accidentally hypnotizes their nemesis. Now he’s running around thinking he’s the real Captain Underpants, and not a moment too soon as a real-life supervillain just got a job as their new science teacher. This is the sort of plot that takes off on its own wacky trajectory and never really connects with any lived experience. It’s just elastic, stretchy fun.

There are absolutely no lessons beyond a healthy esteem for a good sense of humor as screenwriter Nicholas Stoller (in a mode like his superior family entertainments Storks and Muppets Most Wanted instead of his raunchy R-rated comedies like Neighbors) makes a hurtling adaptation of Dav Pilkey’s popular and irreverent kids’ books. True to the nonsense spirit of those imaginatively frivolous volumes, the movie is the most nonstop-juvenile family film in ages. It’s about nothing but bright colors, loud noises, rapid-fire gags, slapstick, silliness, and potty humor. A man leaps through a closed second-story window, leaving behind a hole the shape of his silhouette. Cars slam into pedestrians and leave them unharmed. A brainwashed principal leads the school band in a whoopee cushion rendition of the 1812 Overture (conveniently renamed the 1812 Ofarture). The villain’s evil plot is to rid the world of laughter because he can’t stand hearing it every time he introduces himself. (His name is Professor Poopypants, and it is even funnier when you hear Nick Kroll’s chewy phony German accent thunder it loud and proud in surround sound.) A broad burlesque of superhero tropes flits just beneath the story, which is entirely driven by the gags it can produce. Giant toilets, radioactive leftovers, mad scientist hooey, and wackadoodle plot turns are packed in every which way and it all wraps up in under 90 minutes.

Wacky caricatures and mindless frivolity are the name of the game. But the movie really gathers its charm by engaging in an elastic anything-for-a-joke structure and aesthetic. Multiple characters break the fourth wall and frequent narration overlaps and undercuts the central narrative with flashbacks and jokey tossed-off frames. Squishy CG figures make up the movie’s baseline reality – a cheaper, simpler, exaggerated approach that’s closer to a glossy corner-cutting Saturday morning cartoon look – from which it can take off into asides where sequences play out in hand-drawn 2D images, recreated flip books, and even one pleasantly unexpected stopover in a sock puppet world. The whole thing has so much frizzy schoolboy (and it is a boy-centric story, with weirdly nary a prominent girl in sight) energy that it’s a wonder the slapdash narrative and gratingly one-note characters don’t wear out their welcome. There’s not much to hold onto but the film’s giddy goofiness, and that’s where the blessedly short runtime comes in. It gets you out the door before you beg for it to stop, and are still moderately pleased by the dopey buzz of nonsense and the Weird Al theme song in the credits. Sometimes that’s all you need.

Winging It: STORKS

Storks is a rather unlikely animated family film. You can think of it as either a broad contemporization of the ancient European myth of large white birds delivering children. And you can say it’s a wacky cartoon about where babies come from brought to you by a Pixar alum (Doug Sweetland, of the energetic rabbit v. magician short Presto) and a writer-director of vulgar R-rated comedies (Nicholas Stoller, of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Neighbors). Either way it sounds improbable that it’d work, let alone be sweet, gentle, and good-natured. Nonetheless, here it is, a genial, amusing animated comedy that takes flight in lots of unexpected silliness and cleverly developed metaphor. You may question the need to reinvigorate and reinterpret the old storks legend. I don’t know what they’re teaching in health classes these days, but maybe a candy-colored kids’ movie about how loveable babies are, how easy they are to get, and how they can heal a broken family is not exactly a totally helpful message. Still, Sweetland and Stoller throw themselves into their high-concept with upbeat energy and a winning sense of fun.

When the story begins, storks have stopped delivering babies. Instead, their warehouse perched at the top of Stork Mountain is a distribution hub for CornerStore dot com, and they pride themselves on speedy delivery. With no more messy, demanding babies to fuss with, productivity is up and profitability is way up. Because you’ve seen this setup before, you know it’s a good thing that’s bound to be bad. The movie takes a bunch of component parts from other family movies of this ilk – a conventional journey narrative, character arcs of positive self-discovery, and workaholics who need to slow down and appreciate down time with family – and grinds them through a slapstick machine, making pleasant and enjoyable entertainment out of it. A stork on the precipice of a big promotion has a big problem when the one human around – a girl whose name tag was broken at birth, so she’s lived her entire life with the birds – inadvertently sends a dead letter into the dormant baby-making machine. Now the stork and the girl must work together to get the new baby to her parents before anyone realizes their mistake. Madcap goofiness ensues.

The filmmakers create a fairly typical CG animation style of rounded, squishy surfaces, but slather on a sheen of stretchiness that’s more malleable and rubbery than other studios’ house styles. Freed from the Pixar/DreamWorks/Sony/and so on mold, the movie is free to exercise its dusting of cartoony elasticity as it goes through familiar paces. Is there any doubt that the blustering bird boss (Kelsey Grammer) will be defeated, the toady pigeon (Stephen Kramer Glickman) will get his comeuppance, and the busy human parents (Jennifer Aniston and Ty Burrell) will grow closer to their adorable moppet (Anton Starkman)? Of course not. But what saves the movie are its loopy line-readings and whimsical nonsense. The slimy pigeon is a scene-stealer, a mushy Valley Guy accent stumbling through his vacuous scheming. A pack of wolves (its leaders voiced by Key and Peele) can form bridges, boats, and more with their fast reflexes and groupthink sync. Penguins do battle in silence, trying not to wake the baby. There are a lot of silly touches embellishing the edges of the familiar paces. My favorite was a bird singing a song to which he doesn’t know all the lyrics, the subtitles inviting us to sing along devolving into garbled gibberish right in step with him.

That’s the fun on the margins, though. Keeping the core throughline fun are the leads, a frazzled stork (Andy Samberg), way in over his head and desperate to prove himself even with a broken wing, and a cute, weird girl (Katie Crown), a determined and endearing string bean with a frizzy mop of red hair. The performers approach the material from odd angles, chirping and swooping around what in other hands would be obvious punchlines and sentimental button-pushing. In a movie built on a succession of improbable ideas, perhaps the most unlikely is the one that trusted an audience to care about the friendship between a stork and a girl, not to mention their commitment to caring for a babbling infant while taking her to her rightful family. It teeters on the edge of unbelievable, but somehow the movie is energetic and amiable enough, and the voices enjoyable enough, to sell it. In the end the whole zippy, cuddly thing is even a little moving in its story of humanity and diversity beating the soulless corporation, bringing joy back to families of all races, sizes, and compositions. You could do a lot worse than that.

Block Party: NEIGHBORS 2: SORORITY RISING

Like so many comedy sequels, Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising is little more than a belabored reason to repeat the first movie’s basic structure and gags, with a lower joke success rate and a sparser humor density. At least in this case the “little more” is interesting. So it’s not nothing, but still quite a bit less enjoyable than the broad, bawdy, and surprisingly thoughtful sight-gag heavy original. It found a frat house (led by Zac Efron) moving in next door to a married couple (Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen) and their baby. This was, of course, an acrimonious situation, generational discomfort agitated into a prank war as the parents sad to see their youth slipping away desperately attempted to get the frat bros evicted. By the end they’d reach some understanding, the bros and the adults going to their separate ways supposedly wiser for the experience. Not so, it turns out, as a sorority moves into the now-empty frat and the cycle starts all over again.

Getting a sorority involved is the movie’s cleverest idea. It allows for an exploration of gendered double standards, explicitly asking if the wild behavior and mean-spirited pranks the girls get up to over the course of the story would be considered quite so extreme if it were done by guys. It’s also a sharp elbow in the side of campus culture, bringing up the totally true rule that sororities aren’t allowed to throw parties. This is why a group of misfit freshmen girls (Chloë Grace Moretz, Kiersey Clemons, and Beanie Feldstein, funny, if somehow underused in their own movie) decide to start up their own off-campus sorority, throwing a bunch of parties with cover charges to pay for rent. It’s empowering after a fashion, a sloppy animal house for the young ladies. Girls can have a dumb raunchy college comedy, too, you know. But, alas, that’s where the movie’s inspiration ends.

That freshness is tied to a retread of its returning characters’ emotional arcs. Why not find something new for Rogen and Byrne to do instead of simply worry about the effect of the out-of-control college kids next door again? Wouldn’t it be funny if they tried a different approach? The stakes are ratcheted up from the last time. Now they’ve bought a new house, are close to closing a deal selling their current one, and are afraid the girls will sink the escrow, leaving them with no choice but to go bankrupt. That’s ominous. But their response is to engage in the exact sort of behavior that got them in over their heads last time. Once more they’re torn about their out-of-touch status and fretting about being good parents while roping in old friends (like Ike Barinholtz) to terrorize the sorority and kicking off another prank war. You’d think they’d know better by now. The new idea they try is a contortion to get Efron back in the mix, this time working with them to help combat the youngsters. This is also the point where you realize age is coming for us all, and recent teen star Efron is closer in age to Rogen than to Moretz. Time marches on and whatnot.

The screenplay cobbled together by director Nicholas Stoller, Rogen and writing partner Evan Goldberg, with co-writers Andrew Jay Cohen and Brendan O’Brien takes narrative shortcuts to get to jokes and setpieces. Then, once there, it’s not really worth the time. There’s a lengthy sequence set at a tailgate that’s just misjudged and tedious. The parties aren’t as fun or chaotic as the first film’s; nor are the relationships between the sorority sisters sketched out as clearly as the frat bros’. That’s not to say there aren’t funny developments – a handful of Minions-inspired cutaway jokes are almost reason enough to have made the movie – but the lengths to which it goes to generate less of an effect than before is a little dispiriting. So much falls flat and so little seems to be telling a focused story or expressing coherent behavior that it’s just sitting there on screen.

Yet as far as disappointing and unnecessary sequels go, this one’s not actively harmful, just a bit of a drag. The performers have a lot of energy – more than the plot, jokes, and filmmaking know what to do with – and the whole thing has a nice low-key progressive bent. It’s not straining to be open-minded. It just is. There’s a sharp, if occasionally muddled, understanding of what it means to be a woman on a college campus and the sexist lenses with which society at large views them. (Blame the few cheaper moments – like weeping en masse to a sad movie – on the total lack of women in the writer’s room, I suppose.) And there’s something to its casual, natural acceptance. An early scene finds a gay couple’s engagement joyously celebrated by their former frat bros who jump up and down chanting “U.S.A.” That’s a patriotic image in my book. Would that all these good intentions turn the lackluster film around them into something worth the watch.

The Boys Next Door: NEIGHBORS

An R-rated comedy can sour quickly. There’s a tendency among Hollywood’s purveyors of that subgenre to rush to the R and forget the comedy when planning their edgiest jokes or letting the actors endlessly riff on the lines until scenes grow baggy and dirty. The surprise of Nicholas Stoller’s Neighbors is that it gets the balance mostly right. You’d think a movie about a married couple and their newborn daughter who find their lovely suburban college-town lives disrupted by a rowdy fraternity moving in next door would lend itself to lazy stereotypes and general degeneracy. It does, but even though the movie is exuberantly vulgar, broad, and loud, it never loses track of the human qualities in its characters. There’s an allowance for some small nuance that avoids reducing the characters to their cheapest, ugliest selves.

We start with the married couple (Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne) trying to adjust to life as parents. Unlike Rogen’s many man-child roles, this is a movie about two adults who are mostly happy to have matured to the extent they have. With movies like Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The Five Year Engagement, director Stoller has proven himself interested in exploring the emotional shifts the continual process of growing as an adult entails. In his films, the relationships ring true and are treated with a degree of weight. Here our leads are doting on and toting around their adorable baby, enjoying life while still wondering if having a child has to mean leaving their carefree party days behind. Just as they’re figuring out their new, more responsible, fully adult selves, an explosion of youthful id moves in next door.

At first it doesn’t seem so bad. The frat’s president (Zac Efron) promises they’ll keep the noise down. The other boys (Dave Franco, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Jerrod Carmichael, Craig Roberts) seem nice enough, cooing over the baby and saying they want to keep the neighborhood pleasant. But then the partying starts. It’s loud, long, and debauched, just as you’d expect. And soon the couple is forced to call in a noise complaint. When the responding cop (Hannibal Buress) tells the frat the source of the call, the frat takes it up a notch. They aren’t just loud and obnoxious partiers by night, litterers and loiterers by day. (That’s familiar to anyone who has lived in a college town.) They’re now actively antagonistic, pranking their neighbors in escalatingly dangerous and improbable ways. After a visit to the flighty dean (Lisa Kudrow) proves unhelpful, the couple decides to sabotage the frat and shut them down for good. The script by Andrew J. Cohen and Brendan O’Brien follows a clear structure, with the frat behaving boorishly and the couple plotting ways to force them out.

With such a setup, it’d be easy for the movie to fall into characterization as simple and button-pushing as its preoccupation with bodily functions, body parts, and bodily harm. A lesser comedy would make the frat boys only villains and the thirtysomethings only virtuous. Here the terrible frat boys are, between raunch and bullying, allowed moments of surprising tenderness, self-doubt, and worry about their fast-approaching post-graduation prospects. One guy goes to a job fair where he’s told flat out he’s “too dumb.” Later, one frat kid earnestly tells another, “You don’t like them [the neighbors] because they remind you of the future.” As for those neighbors, they like smoking a little weed now and then, want to keep their sex life interesting, and have real doubts about the suburban bliss they feel pressure to want. These unexpected shadings go a long way towards balancing the broader, dumber moments.

Some of the situations are unlikely. (Wouldn’t the couple at least close their curtains at night?) Slapstick – like a violent and far-fetched airbags prank – and gross-out gags – like a breastfeeding emergency or, worse, a mix-up involving a discarded, unused prophylactic – might go too far. But the film remains largely likable because it has the right balance. Cinematographer Brandon Trost (who also worked on the better-looking-than-you’d-think This is the End) shoots with a slick, loosely held style that gives weight and a degree of realism to the proceedings. Maybe that’s why the more exaggerated moments feel a bit false, but it also helps sell the truth in the solid performances. Rogen and Byrne have warm chemistry and easy repartee. I particularly liked them arguing about who gets to be the irresponsible Kevin James-type in their marriage. Around them the ensemble – from Efron and Franco on down – is well-cast and well-deployed. And the baby is adorable, ready to give cute cutaway reaction shots while being kept nice and safe, sleeping peacefully when the most dangerous moments erupt.

Too often movies about frats want to wink, nudge, and enjoy the sexism, racism, carousing, and homophobic hazing, wallowing in celebratory immaturity. It’s good, then, that Neighbors finds itself squarely on the side of growing up, saying to do so means finding the proper balance between partying and responsibility. It likes its characters, even when they make mistakes, even at their most caricatured and stereotypical. It’s not a great comedy, a little low on laughs, but it’s pleasant enough to be a decent time at the movies. Without a mean spirit and with a relatively short runtime of 90 minutes and change, it’s the rare R-rated comedy that accommodates dirty jokes, bad behavior, and even a few unfunny scenes, without going sour. 

Together Again, Again: MUPPETS MOST WANTED

Muppets Most Wanted finds Jim Henson’s loveable felt-and-fur goofballs up to their usual good-natured meta trickiness and bountiful warm-hearted silliness. Writer-director James Bobin, co-writer Nicholas Stoller, and songwriter Bret McKenzie, who revived the franchise in 2011 with the surprisingly nostalgic and emotional – but no less gut-bustingly funny – The Muppets, are upfront about what their new picture is. It’s a sequel with the Muppets fresh off the success of their last movie setting off on a European tour where they cross paths with a jewel heist in progress. If that sounds partly like a riff on 1981’s The Great Muppet Caper, the original Muppet sequel, it is and the movie owns up to it, winking right from the start. The opening musical number is “We’re Doing a Sequel,” a song full of funny barbs at the business of Hollywood and a clear tip of the hat to Caper’s curtain raiser “Hey, a Movie!” It’s a movie that loves movies, but loves the Muppets even more. And that’s irresistible.

In their opening number, which starts right after the closing number in the last movie, the gang sings about being a “viable franchise” and preparing what’s technically their “seventh sequel,” warning that means it’s “not quite as good.” The Muppets are perpetual optimistic underdogs, lovable misfits who scramble around with manic showbiz energy, eager to tell you that the show must go on. Their personalities are so agreeably constant, chaos and order held in perfect, immutable manic amusement. It’s fun to see them, as performed here by Steve Whitmire, Eric Jacobson, Dave Goelz, Bill Barretta, David Rudman, Matt Vogel, and Peter Linz, bounce off of each other in the old ways. Fearless leader Kermit the Frog, exasperated, is always wrangling Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Gonzo, Animal, and all the others, competing egos and eccentricities that constantly threaten to derail their variety shows.

As usual, story exists mainly to provide a rigid genre form for the Muppets to push against, moving through charmingly near-slapdash sequences of jokes and songs. Most Wanted’s plot involves the world’s greatest criminal mastermind, a Kermit-lookalike frog named Constantine. He plots to swap places with the showbiz icon and use the cover of the Muppet tour to burgle museums at every stop. Most of the movie finds the fake Kermit faking his way through interactions with the characters we know and love, while the real Kermit plots to escape a goofy Siberian gulag. Tina Fey plays the warden, snarling, but softhearted underneath. Fellow prisoners include Ray Liotta and Jemaine Clement with thick Russian accents and Danny Trejo playing himself. (His description of his “triple threat” attributes is priceless.) At least the guards and the prisoners can agree on something, when they sing a song about how their prison is the best state-funded hotel in all of Russia. Kermit just wants out of there.

The Muppets gang moves along unaware of the switch for a while, though some grow suspicious about the changes in their old pal Kermit. He talks with a gargling vaguely foreign accent now, but their new tour manager Dominic Badguy (Ricky Gervais, playing up his shiftiness) assures them their friend just has a cold. They continue with their plan to stage Muppet Shows in a collection of European cities, every place an occasion for good culturally specific jokes. In Berlin, the theater marquee reads “Die Muppets.” Seeing this, Statler and Waldorf wryly wonder if the reviews are in already or if that’s the suggestion box. Meanwhile, a French INTERPOL agent (Ty Burrell, with a chewy Clouseau accent) and Sam the Eagle bumblingly investigate the robberies that seem to be following the Muppets around.

The impostor storyline allows the franchise a level on which to comment upon its own evolution. Once more Bobin, Stoller, and McKenzie prove their love for the Muppets. Their version of these characters is not an exact recreation. How could it be? The Muppets haven’t been exactly the same since Jim Henson died, and later when Frank Oz stepped away. No matter how good, Bobin and his crew are impersonators. But Most Wanted, like The Muppets before it, is filled with such affection for the characters and the smart silliness of Henson’s original vision, we’re better off with these films than none at all, or, worse yet, soulless profit-driven corporate property perpetuation. It’s a movie that knows what made the Muppets most lovable and sets out recreating it as best it can, with love and care. The filmmakers are true to the Muppet spirit without suffocating their own comic sensibilities in an effort to recreate the work of the irreplaceable original Muppet artists. The film’s story is resolved because Muppets are true to themselves and to each other. I’m glad to see their new stewards are as well.

Muppets Most Wanted is very good entertainment, loaded up with smart references and broad craziness. It’s a satisfyingly warm and inviting brand of inspired high/low comedy, a barrage of puns, vaudeville sketches, dry asides, sloppy slapstick, and cornball dad humor, with wall-to-wall witty musical numbers, lovable homage, and tickling satire. There’s also a fleet of random and inspired cameos, a good half of which kids today won’t get and most are sure to baffle kids of the future. In other words, it’s a Muppet movie. I had a smile on my face the whole way through. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Love and Marriage: THE FIVE-YEAR ENGAGEMENT

Lacking the focus and bite that gave Nicholas Stoller’s bad-break-up island-getaway comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall its notable power, his newest film, The Five-Year Engagement, starts strong, but gets softer and lousier the longer it goes on. It follows Tom (Jason Segel, also the co-writer) and Violet (Emily Blunt), who keep pushing back their wedding date whenever they encounter new obstacles. He’s a chef in San Francisco, but she gets a job offer at the University of Michigan. Why not take the job, move across the country and delay the wedding? The timing just doesn’t work out, but they love each other. They’re devoted and supportive. But why rush? They’ll be spending their whole lives together, after all. What’s another year? Or two? Or three?

As the story slips through events that take place over the course of what is eventually the five years of the title, it becomes a relatively lengthy, shapeless movie that meanders from scene to scene. At first it’s a rush of parties and preparations, but then time stretches out and seasons turn. Tom’s parents (great character actors Mimi Kennedy and David Paymer) and Violet’s parents (Jim Piddock and Jacki Weaver, so frightening in her Oscar-nominated role as the crime family matriarch in Animal Kingdom) would like to see them married sooner rather than later. The wedding is always on the horizon, but the distance to it never seems to shrink. Tom sees his goofy friend (Chris Pratt) receive the promotion he would have gotten had he remained in San Francisco. Violet sees her sister (Alison Brie) get married and have a baby.

But those happenings are more than half a country away from Ann Arbor, Michigan, a great city in its own right. It’s a charming college town that nonetheless provides wintry challenges to these Californians. And the people they meet are certainly friendly and challenging in ways related to their individual eccentricities. Violet’s boss (Rhys Ifans) and colleagues (Mindy Kaling, Kevin Hart, and Randall Park) and Tom’s newfound friends (including pothead sandwich maker Brian Posehn and stay-at-home dad Chris Parnell) are supportive, if eccentric. They know their way around local bars and hunting weekends respectively. The couple tries again and again to get wedding plans off the ground, but for one reason or another the date is pushed back again and again.

A wobbly mix of shapelessness and sharpness gives the movie its lackadaisical approach. The main problem here is the way it becomes clear that Tom and Violet have a pretty good relationship. I’m glad that the filmmakers at first steer clear of stupid movie-plot conflicts as ways to push back the wedding. It seems perfectly reasonable to avoid rushing into marriage, especially when Tom’s struggling to restart his chef ambitions in their new environs and Violet is trying to navigate the start of a promising career in academia. They love each other and, even if professional goals frustrate them at times, it doesn’t seem to effect their essential compatibility or their enjoyment of each other’s company, even when they argue. In the film’s most quietly funny and painfully accurate scene, Tom lashes out, complaining about his seemingly stagnant path in life, and finally says that he’d like some alone time. Violet gets up to go into the next room, but he calls after her. “Where are you going? I want to be alone here with you.”

What’s so unexpectedly sharp and recognizably humane about this film is the way it soberly approaches romance from a practical standpoint. This isn’t a swoony love-conquers-all Hollywood concoction. This is a movie that acknowledges in a serious, albeit in a mostly comedic context, the difficulties of blending two lives into one, especially when the people involved are struggling to get their lives as individuals started. It’s a movie about the futile pursuit of future perfection when the present is pretty good already.

By the movie’s back half, though, the sweetness and laid-back observation of this couple living their lives becomes just another romantic comedy. Contrived conflicts arise that divide the two, causing them to rethink their entire relationship. The plotting devolves into a distended version of the standard strained crisis before eventual reconciliation that can be found in so many romantic comedies, even some of the good ones. What’s particularly disappointing about this change is that the movie starts as a nicely unconventional look at romance, questioning a pressing need for matrimony when things seem to be so unsettled. The easy charm of the cast and the likable rapport of Segel and Blunt remain, but the supporting cast has been underdeveloped and the jokes have been a bit undercooked and so they just can’t carry the slow switch into formula. The whole thing starts to take on a feeling of an affable but lumbering episodic mess. 

Inspirational Celebrational Muppetational: THE MUPPETS

Now this is the Muppets! Jim Henson’s cast of lovable, furry misfits, oddballs, and weirdoes from The Muppet Show and several delightful feature films, haven’t been seen on the big screen for twelve years, languishing all this time in a couple TV specials and a handful of YouTube videos. They haven’t been gone, not exactly, but they haven’t been a cultural presence the way they once were. Since Henson’s untimely death in 1990, the characters have seemed every-so-slightly lost. This new feature, called simply The Muppets, reintroduces them in the biggest, funniest, loveliest, way possible. This is a hugely satisfying film that scrambles all definitions of kids’ films and grown-ups’ films, a giddy nostalgic reunion with old friends, and an unmitigated success.

The Muppets have found a great new voice, one that sounds as close to their old voice as possible without Henson, in co-writers Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller. You might remember their Apatow production Forgetting Sarah Marshall in which the main character wants to produce an all-puppet Dracula musical. That film’s grand finale was that production, complete with sweet song-and-felt numbers. Of course, that film was most definitely R, but their love of G-rated Muppetry was obvious in that sequence. The Muppets have an earnest and earned innocence, a broad delight in vaudevillian antics, puns, slapstick, heartfelt musical numbers and staying true to yourself while sticking by your closest friends. Segel and Stoller get that perfectly in a splashy, witty musical with great numbers written by Bret McKenzie of Flight of the Conchords, who knows a thing or two about funny songs. Together they create a film that starts by acknowledging that the world has seemingly left the Muppets behind, but, even if unexpressed, the world is desperately in need of their return.

At the film’s start we’re introduced to Gary (Segel), a human, and his brother Walter, a Muppet in Smalltown, USA. They’re big fans of The Muppet Show and plan a trip with Gary’s girlfriend, Mary (Amy Adams), to Los Angeles, the main attracting being the Muppet Studios. They set off to L.A. on a bus by way of a musical number. When they arrive at their destination, they’re disappointed to discover the place run down, an unenthused tour guide informing them that the Muppets haven’t been seen in years. Poking around the rundown buildings on his own, Walter overhears the property’s owner, Tex Richman (Chris Cooper), explaining to Statler and Waldorf (the old heckling duo) his plans for bulldozing the place to drill for oil. The Muppets would need ten million dollars to buy back the old theater.

Horrified, Walter sets out determined to save the Muppet Theater. Luckily, he eventually runs into Kermit the Frog and convinces him to try and raise the money by getting the old gang back together and putting on a show. Why not? After all, it was Mickey Rooney himself who helped see Gary, Mary, and Walter off at the Smalltown bus stop. So, Kermit his new pals set off to gather up all the Muppets they can find, all of whom have long since gone their separate ways. Some are struggling, singing in a Muppet tribute band at a shady hotel lounge, for instance. Others are doing reasonably well for themselves, like working at Vogue’s Paris bureau. Regardless of circumstance, though, most are more than happy to jump back into their old variety show ways. It’s an utter delight to see the Muppets reunite one by one: Fozzie Bear, Gonzo, Animal, Rowlf, and Miss Piggy. And what would a Muppet movie be without Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker? Sam Eagle? The Swedish Chef? Dr. Teeth? They’re all here and more besides, including some ingenious celebrity cameos I wouldn’t dare spoil.

What makes the movie so very entertaining is the nonstop hilarity that comes from a sweet, good-natured desire to do nothing more bring joy and laughter to the world. The script is filled with funny meta flourishes that comment on the Muppets’ faded cultural status and extended absence as well as the film’s very nature as a film. In an opening sequence, a terrific Broadway-style musical number, there is a pause in the music and the dancing townsfolk are seen lounging around, waiting for their cue to start up again. Later, plot points are resolved through literal movie magic. How to drive to Europe? Let’s go by map! How to pick up all the rest of the Muppets in a timely manner? Use a montage! Director James Bobin, veteran of TV comedy, brings an effortless cinematic quality to such playful filmmaking, allowing these gorgeously simple piece of felt to find their footing once again without ever once letting it feel dated or quaint. He wrangles the production well. The familiar felt faces (performed and voiced by Steve Whitmire, Eric Jacobson, Dave Goelz, Bill Barretta, David Rudman, and Matt Vogel) mix well with the game human cast, who are entirely unselfconscious in the face of such broad and varied, smiling wit and whimsy. The film’s hip, clever, and witty without feeling edgy or contemporary. It has the timeless feel you’d want.

What makes the movie somewhat moving is the way it uses new Muppet Walter to illuminate that which has always made the Muppets so singularly special. They’re all misfits in some way. They’re too loud, too corny, and too musical. They try their hardest and seem unfazed when they fail. They’re not afraid to get mad at each other, but they’re even less afraid of forgiving each other. They’re friends and colleagues who have come together in spite of their weirdness, united by their desire to bring happiness into the world and to celebrate the weirdness, the boundless hope and enthusiasm that makes them so wonderful. Walter doesn’t fit in. But with the Muppets, he can find acceptance. The Muppets have always communicated this message. It gets better. All you have to do is be yourself and there’s a chance that you’ll find just the right group of misfits who love the same things you do, who support you every step of the way, and who will pick up a friendship right where it left off, even if it’s been years. The humor and the wisdom of the Muppets come from their unwavering consistency of personality. They are who they are.

I hadn’t seen these guys on the big screen since 1996’s Muppet Treasure Island. So, I was somewhat surprised to find that, as I waited all day to see an evening show of The Muppets, I felt a rare anticipation of the kind I associate only with childhood Christmas Eves. The film was a present worth waiting for. It’s the funniest movie of the year, the best movie musical in many a year, and a film so purely, warmly enjoyable that I had a smile on my face from the first scene to the last credit. It’s a joyous return for these characters, a generous, contagious, blast of effervescent exuberance and fun that recaptures the old magic. The film’s working title was The Greatest Muppet Movie Ever Made. I’d imagine a humble deference to the characters’ legacy caused the change, but now having seen it, that original title would have barely been hyperbole. This is as good as these iconic characters have ever been and certainly their best feature film since 1979’s The Muppet Movie. It’s truly a rekindled rainbow connection. Welcome back, Muppets!