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Tweety's High-Flying Adventure
Warner Bros. // Unrated // September 18, 2007
List Price: $14.98 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
If this were the 1970s and Hanna-Barbera were producing, "Tweety's High-Flying Adventure" would've been stretched out to a 13-episode series. And you know what? Those producers in this hypothetical bit of time travel would have been right. Hidden underneath all the cramped action in "High-Flying" is a zany travelogue along the lines of "Wacky Races" or "Laff-A-Lympics." But this effort, a direct-to-video feature originally released on VHS in 2000 and only now arriving on DVD, zips by so quickly through its disjointed globetrotting escapades that it never really works when squeezed into its teeny 70-minute timeframe.
The feature is a surprisingly not-as-loose-as-you'd-think adaptation of Jules Verne's "Around the World in 80 Days." Tweety (voiced by Looney Tunes mainstay Joe Alasky) takes on the familiar world-spanning challenge, with a bonus twist: in his passport, Tweety must also collect the paw prints of eighty cats. It's all to help Granny (June Foray) win enough money to save a children's park scheduled to be demolished.
There's not so much a story as there is a string of random episodes, with Tweety outsmarting Sylvester and/or other cats in a variety of world cities. We zip from place to place without any regard for attention span (some locales come and go with such speed that I wonder why they're in there at all), while subplots (including one about a stolen royal passport and a scheming cockney hooligan) never really amount to much of anything. There's no time to be leisurely here - and yet there's barely any of the trademark Looney Tunes anarchy helping to make the breakneck pace worth it. Aside from one brilliantly handled visual gag involving Wile E. Coyote, all of the comedy is stale and uninspired, the sort of forgettable fluff common to the franchise around the turn of the century.
Indeed, "High-Flying" comes to us from the team behind "The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries," the passably bland late-90s cartoon. Here, their writing is equally meh, clumsily gluing a couple mediocre action sequences and iffy comic set pieces together, tossing in a few limp musical numbers and cheap one-liners, and calling it a movie.
There's also a new character, a girlfriend for Tweety (I spent half my life convinced Tweety was a she, by the way) named Princess Aooga. She's simply Tweety painted pink and given a headband, which reveals just how much effort was put into this project.
One thing the filmmakers do get right is the visuals. "High-Flying" takes a unique approach to its animation design, paying tribute to decades of Looney Tunes cartooning. Supporting characters are wildly diverse in their looks; while some have a standard "golden age" look, others notably look like they've come from the sleeker 50s/60s era of the franchise. (And it's not just Looney Tunes the animators mimic - kids look like cousins of Gerald McBoing-Boing; a villain looks like a player from "Tennessee Tuxedo.") Backgrounds vary from setting to setting, with some cities looking quite realistic, others coming across quite abstract, with striking watercolor enhancement. The globetrotting storyline gives the animation staff room to play, and it results in a movie that might not be much fun to watch, but it's plenty fun to look at.
For all my grumpiness, I should note that my daughter, age seven, loved the film, and even though she had seen it several times before on Cartoon Network, she enjoyed rewatching it. So sure, it fails to match even the admittedly mediocre level of later-day Looney Tunes shorts, but at least its target audience enjoys it.
The DVD
Video & Audio
"High-Flying" looks very solid in this transfer, which preserves the original 1.33:1 full frame format. Colors are bright and lines are sharp, with no motion blurring or other digital defects. The soundtrack, in Dolby 5.1, is equally impressive and clean. A French dub is available (in Dolby stereo), as are optional English for the Hearing Impaired subtitles.
Extras
None, unless you count the collection of previews and ads for other related videos and games. (The promo for a Looney Tunes video game includes cheat codes, if you want to call that an extra.) Another assortment of previews plays when the disc loads; you can skip over them if you wish.
Final Thoughts
While "High-Flying" isn't nearly as miserable as other similar projects of late (I'm looking at you, "Bah, Humduck!"), it's still utterly forgettable stuff. Your kids will enjoy it enough a couple times, so sure, go ahead and Rent It, but there's no need to keep it.
The feature is a surprisingly not-as-loose-as-you'd-think adaptation of Jules Verne's "Around the World in 80 Days." Tweety (voiced by Looney Tunes mainstay Joe Alasky) takes on the familiar world-spanning challenge, with a bonus twist: in his passport, Tweety must also collect the paw prints of eighty cats. It's all to help Granny (June Foray) win enough money to save a children's park scheduled to be demolished.
There's not so much a story as there is a string of random episodes, with Tweety outsmarting Sylvester and/or other cats in a variety of world cities. We zip from place to place without any regard for attention span (some locales come and go with such speed that I wonder why they're in there at all), while subplots (including one about a stolen royal passport and a scheming cockney hooligan) never really amount to much of anything. There's no time to be leisurely here - and yet there's barely any of the trademark Looney Tunes anarchy helping to make the breakneck pace worth it. Aside from one brilliantly handled visual gag involving Wile E. Coyote, all of the comedy is stale and uninspired, the sort of forgettable fluff common to the franchise around the turn of the century.
Indeed, "High-Flying" comes to us from the team behind "The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries," the passably bland late-90s cartoon. Here, their writing is equally meh, clumsily gluing a couple mediocre action sequences and iffy comic set pieces together, tossing in a few limp musical numbers and cheap one-liners, and calling it a movie.
There's also a new character, a girlfriend for Tweety (I spent half my life convinced Tweety was a she, by the way) named Princess Aooga. She's simply Tweety painted pink and given a headband, which reveals just how much effort was put into this project.
One thing the filmmakers do get right is the visuals. "High-Flying" takes a unique approach to its animation design, paying tribute to decades of Looney Tunes cartooning. Supporting characters are wildly diverse in their looks; while some have a standard "golden age" look, others notably look like they've come from the sleeker 50s/60s era of the franchise. (And it's not just Looney Tunes the animators mimic - kids look like cousins of Gerald McBoing-Boing; a villain looks like a player from "Tennessee Tuxedo.") Backgrounds vary from setting to setting, with some cities looking quite realistic, others coming across quite abstract, with striking watercolor enhancement. The globetrotting storyline gives the animation staff room to play, and it results in a movie that might not be much fun to watch, but it's plenty fun to look at.
For all my grumpiness, I should note that my daughter, age seven, loved the film, and even though she had seen it several times before on Cartoon Network, she enjoyed rewatching it. So sure, it fails to match even the admittedly mediocre level of later-day Looney Tunes shorts, but at least its target audience enjoys it.
The DVD
Video & Audio
"High-Flying" looks very solid in this transfer, which preserves the original 1.33:1 full frame format. Colors are bright and lines are sharp, with no motion blurring or other digital defects. The soundtrack, in Dolby 5.1, is equally impressive and clean. A French dub is available (in Dolby stereo), as are optional English for the Hearing Impaired subtitles.
Extras
None, unless you count the collection of previews and ads for other related videos and games. (The promo for a Looney Tunes video game includes cheat codes, if you want to call that an extra.) Another assortment of previews plays when the disc loads; you can skip over them if you wish.
Final Thoughts
While "High-Flying" isn't nearly as miserable as other similar projects of late (I'm looking at you, "Bah, Humduck!"), it's still utterly forgettable stuff. Your kids will enjoy it enough a couple times, so sure, go ahead and Rent It, but there's no need to keep it.
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