Well! This is probably the worst title card I've ever made! |
The Raving Rabbids. What else is there to say? You’re free to enjoy them, you’re free to despise them. Personally? I like them. They’re… I’m not sure how to explain it… A study on stupidity. They’re idiots, all of them. The rare few smart Rabbids would still be dumber than any American animated sitcom dad of your choice. Their utter lack of comprehension of human society leads them to screw up even the most basic of tasks, in completely unexpected and unpredictable ways. It takes a lot of creativity to ditch all logic and imagine how these creatures with failing knowledge of our customs, lacking in the IQ department, would approach each new discovery.
At least they're not the Minions. |
I posted a quickie review of the French comic books
here; at first, I was planning to add it to this review, but it would have made
for a very long article. Go and look it up here.
Well, I can throw away my atlas now. It's become useless. |
The intro sequence sets the tone: Hordes of Rabbids
running around, dragging ropes, stringing up entire continents… zoom back and
Planet Earth’s lands have been cut up and reshaped to form a giant Raving
Rabbid. Well that’s a novel way of “taking over the world”…
No! Not the Statue of Liberty! I am fairly certain it doesn't like getting tied up like this! ...Or maybe it does? |
As for the series itself, you might think there isn’t
much to say. You'd be mistaken. There is, indeed, more to be said about this silly little TV show about unintelligible alien bunnies than it seems at first glance.
Let’s not forget that the Rabbids
are basically aliens. If we follow the plot of the first games, they appeared
someday in Rayman’s world, kidnapped him and put him through a bunch of
mini-games. Then they moved to a world "closer to reality" (Air quotes). As in, a world of
shopping malls, humans, television and whatnot. Rayman went back to his home
world, while the Rabbids stayed in the new world. And so we got Rabbids Go
Home, which set the tone for the later games of the franchise – and for this
show.
"This phone tastes bad, but not as bad as that Switch cartridge I licked the other day." |
These two want a balloon. The kid won't hand it over. I know I wouldn't. |
The only humans who seem to constantly bear an interest in the invaders is a duo of researchers, John and Gina. They grab bunnies from a nearby junkyard, bring them to their lab, and put them through various experiments. Usually in an attempt to figure out the limits of Rabbid intelligence… which they reach pretty quickly.
They'll need a LOT of experimentation to figure out how to make a vinyl player work. Once they've figured it out, that's when the fun starts. |
A) Rabbids try to mimic human behavior;
B) Rabbids discover a new item and go through
trial-and-error to figure out how to use it;
C) Rabbids have a set goal in mind, whether they want
an item or wish to go somewhere;
D) One Rabbid is being belittled and mocked by the
others, and tries to become friends with them;
E) Or the experiment episodes featuring John, Gina, and the bunnies they’ve got in their test chamber.
I have to give this show credit, the stories are
simple. But then again, the episodes are seven minutes long, with three of them
for a half-hour with commercials. As a result, the show quickly presents the
setting, the characters, and the motive, and then fills the remaining time with
slapstick and jokes, and a nifty little conclusion. While it frequently causes the episodes to lack depth, it fils the quota in jokes. Some episodes are deeper than expected, and carry pretty interesting messages.
Look for the episode "Rabbid Test N98005-c: The Blue Rabbid". Best episode of the entire show, I swear. |
The Granny: Poor eyesight and curlers. Stereotypes! |
This is a full TV show, which means animating hours of
CGI, so corners had to be cut. I understand that. Were we to get a CGI show
based on, say, Zootopia (first example that pops in my mind, no particular
reason), it wouldn’t be as impressive as the movie when it comes to image quality
and detail. The same applies here. Don’t expect the highest caliber of 3D art
in Rabbids Invasion. Setting? Pick one among a few. The fast food restaurant in
the desert, the shopping mall, the beach, the junkyard, the test lab, the
sidewalk, whatever. The Rabbids, that’s easy, they’re all basically the same
(with a few exceptions).
Humans? That’s a bit more complicated. Uh oh... we need multiple character models and variants! (If this was a video, you can imagine a scare chord playing here.) Cutting corners extends to the human population of the show. The first two seasons feature a very small amount of different human characters in appearance. There’s only one human kid, he’s fat and he has poofy hair. The grandmother is always the exact same model. There are other humans who don’t really have anything to differentiate them, since they’re just there to fill the required role for the episode’s plot. Why should we need more than 6 or 7 character models? Take this one, change his skin color and slap a handlebar mustache on his face, there you go, new character. That woman? A new tank top and a dye will suffice. That’s if they even bother changing the character models ever so slightly, as most of the time the animators don’t. They introduce new human models in season 2, thankfully.
Humans? That’s a bit more complicated. Uh oh... we need multiple character models and variants! (If this was a video, you can imagine a scare chord playing here.) Cutting corners extends to the human population of the show. The first two seasons feature a very small amount of different human characters in appearance. There’s only one human kid, he’s fat and he has poofy hair. The grandmother is always the exact same model. There are other humans who don’t really have anything to differentiate them, since they’re just there to fill the required role for the episode’s plot. Why should we need more than 6 or 7 character models? Take this one, change his skin color and slap a handlebar mustache on his face, there you go, new character. That woman? A new tank top and a dye will suffice. That’s if they even bother changing the character models ever so slightly, as most of the time the animators don’t. They introduce new human models in season 2, thankfully.
While on the topic of characters, there’s a few
recurring humans and Rabbids, so you will often see familiar faces coming back
for an episode.
-John and Gina the scientists, who put Rabbids through
various tasks, apparently so that they can find one smart enough to send on the
moon – however, they are constantly flabbergasted by the stupidity of their
test subjects. They have a lab next to the junkyard that serves as home for a
colony of Rabbids, and another one in the Arctic for some reason. They’re the
most developed human characters on the show. Their episodes tend to be really
funny, and sometimes reveal a lot about our invasive protagonists;
-Timothy, the fat kid with poofy hair. I would never
say such a thing about a real human child, but this is a fictional character,
so I’ll be direct: Timothy is a bratty, annoying little shit, and usually
deserves his comeuppance from the Rabbids whenever he gets it;
Rabbids will be amazed at every magic trick, ever. |
-As for the Rabbids themselves, there’s Barranco. This
is the Raving Rabbid from the first few games who had one blue eye and one red
eye, and served as their army’s “general” of sorts. While the bunnies can be
major jerks to each other, they’ll usually help a brother out if needed. Barranco is a full-on jerk. It usually blows up back in his face by the end of
the episode;
That beard IS pretty adorable. |
The more I watch this episode, the more I think the Blue Rabbids are a reference to customization options in the game, and how the uncreative folks just paint their Rabbid a single plain color. |
Because everyone knows that: Dancing doesn't require brains, it's about emotion... and groove!
Toilet humor has always been a staple of the
franchise, from the protagonists’ love for pink toilet paper and reactions to
fart noises, and it’s still a part of the series, though it’s downplayed. I
mean, it’s still there, but it’s not a main focus. Slapstick is far more
common.
Who needs a giant pile when you have a ramp? And no viable vehicle to send upwards to the Moon? |
If your time-traveling clothes dryer gets destroyed by your idiotic descendants, what do you do? Easy. Make a new time-traveling machine out of an old TV! |
"Find That Prop!" Most of the time, it's not even hidden. |
Taken from this video. Also, I should add that various mini-games overuse sund effects while the episode is going on. Especially the fart sound. Because that's always pleasant. |
I mean, it’s not high art, in fact it’s not the best
thing ever, but it’s perfectly serviceable entertainment. Watch an episode, and
you’ll get a few laughs. To give this show credit, it succeeds in being funny.
While researching this show and looking for episodes online, I watched episodes
I hadn’t seen before, and found myself genuinely laughing at times. Slapstick
is difficult to describe as it’s all about timing, but this show does it right.
It’s not trying to revolutionize anything, it’s just
trying to entertain. It doesn’t aim to be the best TV show of all time, and
it’s definitely not the worst thing ever. The CGI animation is decent. It’s a
bit of an issue that the humans aren’t given enough characterization, and that
there aren’t enough human character models, but I understand this was necessary
for a TV show. There’s some gross comedy, but it’s sparse and there’s more
focus on other types of humor, slapstick in particular, which is fine. The writing is better than you’d
expect it to be, with the plots usually focusing the Rabbids’ bone-headedness
and stupidity in trying to understand and copy human behavior. There are many
clever moments as well, outside of the comedy. Oh, and don’t bother with the
game.
There: All my points, summed up in two paragraphs.
Now, this is where I’d normally announce a new list for the best episodes of
the show, but I haven’t seen every episode. Thankfully, I don’t need to watch
every episode. And I don’t need to make a Top 12 of episodes when those are
only 7 minutes long and can be described in a few short sentences. I will make
a new post to suggest a bunch of interesting episodes, but I won’t dedicate a
full post to that. At the same time, this lets me explain what I meant when I said some episodes had surprising depth to them. Here's the list, by the way: Read it, have fun.
And so, this closes my review of Rabbids Invasion.
Join me next Friday as I review… Rabbids Rumble, for the Nintendo 3DS!
I didn't think anyone would make such an in depth, comprehensive, and extremely accurate synapsis/review of this show. I love it!
ReplyDeleteIs this Nicolas the creator of the Pi Network ($Pi)...?
ReplyDeleteI had to look it up to know what this was. Turns out it's related to cryptocurrency? Yeah, no, whatever it is, I've got nothing to do with that. Cryptocurrencies are garbage.
DeleteI came for rabbid, but i agree that crypto is garbage, pure gamble
Delete