Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet Frankenstein (1999)

In the Alvin and Chipmunks canon this is probably the least interesting video. However small children would enjoy this flick around Halloween.As usual any Alvin video is full of really catchy songs that even I can't stop humming.The theme of this video is on the lighter side so there is no need to worry about scaring your kids with this movie.The animation is bright and cheerful, I can't help but find Alvin, Simon and Theodore really cute in this, though it's probably a video you want to sit your kids in front of and then leave the room.If you enjoyed this you'll enjoy these too.Alvin and The Chipmunks Meet the Wolfman The Chipmunks Adventure.

I picked this up as a 2-pack (bundled with "...meet the Wolfman") at my local video store for a bit of Halloween in July. I'd watched the Wolfman cartoon a few days prior and was impressed with the quality -- It was a monster movie made for kids, and it didn't feel the need to lower the spook-factor for their sake -- and I was hoping the Frankenstein feature would be up to the same par.Looking for some Franken-fun, I popped the DVD back in tonight to watch this film. Unfortunately, on this DVD 2-pack, if the Wolfman feature was the treat, this one was definitely the trick. Whew boy, just minutes into this film and I could tell it was going to be a stinker. Rather than feeling like a monster movie, this one was a poorly-crafted movie that happened to have a monster in it at times. It took a horribly cliché moral lesson that would take only 30 minutes to tell, maximum, and stretched it into a feature length movie, filling the extra time with diversions that lacked any focus whatsoever. The entire story felt disjointed because the film's creators thought that they had to go on wild, manic tangents that had nothing to do with the movie just to keep the kids' attention. Unfortunately, all this did was diminish any interest the audience may have had in its already-weak story.I understand that it may sound like I'm forgetting that this was aimed at kids, and I may have looked past all of these shortcomings if the other Chipmunk monster movie weren't such a solid film.

I am normally a fan of Alvin & the Chipmunks, but the Universal direct-to-video movies (this and also "...Meet the Wolfman") are not high points in their career, and this one is surely the worse of the two. To be fair I haven't actually seen the whole thing... I started watching it on TV a while ago, but lost interest at a certain point and stopped. No other Chipmunk film has ever lost me that completely, not even the 2007 live action movie, of which I'm not a fan.Plain and simply this one is boring, gimmicky, not particularly funny and contains no memorable music. Right from the beginning I had a bad impression, because Alvin and his brothers don't even appear until about 10 minutes into the film, which to me was an indication that more focus was being put on the clichéd Halloween-related elements of the story than on the Chipmunks themselves. The film suffers from poor writing and was just a bad concept overall.A&TC Meet the Wolfman, another similar film released a year later, is slightly more enjoyable, but neither of them are the Chipmunks at their best. It will be unfortunate if these films are the last appearance of these memorable characters in traditional cartoon form.

Oh, wait, that applies to every A&TC cartoon...AAALVEEEN! YOU EEEDIOT! Heh heh heh. But seriously. I used to watch the '80s show when I was but a wee larva, and I never really liked it that much. The show had its good points, but it just seemed kinda slow. And the character designs didn't appeal to me. This movie, which appears to have been put together by all or most of the original creators & voice actors, keeps all the original charm of the older incarnations while giving us a story that's cute, funny, sweet, & never boring, plus subtly redesigned chipmunks that..I dunno, they just look really good in this movie. More alert, like they've taken some caffeine tabs since the '80s. I can't quite explain it. Maybe it's just a higher budget that I'm seeing. Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I've never felt more affection for 'the boys,' and I even found Dave's obligatory exasperation scenes less grating than usual. Could it be that, as I approach adulthood, I'm starting to identify more with his role as the chipmunks' adoptive father? Am I showing signs of creeping maturity? Oh God, I hope not. Anyway, this movie had the feeling of a real labor of love on the part of its producers; hope I'm not mistaken on that count.. Go ahead and rent it or whatever. Two open questions: (1) Why didn't Dave notice the broken glass in the back door? (2) Assistant Director Yoko Ono? Any relation? I know Simon briefly went to see the Maharishi, but...