The Powerpuff Girls Movie

I defy viewers to exit theatres post-Puffery without silly grins on their faces and the urge to save the world in their hearts. The big-screen adaptation of the Cartoon Network's flagship show -- featuring the adventures of a trio of pint-sized superheroines Blossom (Cavadini), Bubbles (Strong), and Buttercup (Daily), who have Charlie Brown heads and anime eyes -- is smart, sassy, silly fun, a pop-culture smorgasbord filtered through the lens of Fifties kitsch and set to a hipster beat that makes you want snap your fingers and beat up on the bad guys at the same time. Sugary light, The Powerpuff Girls movie takes the original show's winning grrrl power formula and tweaks it just enough to carry it to feature length. As promised in the film's ad campaign, this is nonstop frenetic animated action, and, if nothing else, parents can now add the word “frenetic” to the list of terms they won't ever have to worry about their kids muffing on a spelling bee. The script -- by series creator McCracken (who also directed) -- is negligible: Professor Utonium (Kane) mixes up “sugar and spice and mysterious Chemical X” and creates a trio of pint-sized feminine role models (for the preteen set, natch). There's cute Bubbles, proto-riot grrrl Buttercup, and straight-arrow Blossom. In most respects, they're your typical prepubescent girly-girls, but thanks to that dose of Chemical X they have a host of superpowers: strength, flight, and laser-beam eyes suitable for cutting the crusts off their pb&js. Of course, what's a few superpowers without an evil nemesis to tangle with? To that end there's Professor Utonium's other lab experiment gone awry, the nefarious, power-mad, turban-wearing Mojo Jo-Jo, who speaks with a vaguely samurai accent and lives to control the gang's hometown of Townsville. Essentially an origin story in nature, the movie version relates the girls' creation, and then their unwitting enlistment in Mojo Jo-Jo's evil schemes. Not yet fully able to control their wild abilities, the girls at first almost lay waste to Townsville during a very frenetic game of tag, a sequence that comics and animation buffs will recall from any number of newborn comic-book superheroes who haven't quite got the bugs worked out of their superskills just yet. (Didn't the Fantastic Four have exactly this same problem after all those Gamma rays?). Pariahs in the city and shunned by classmates at school, the girls are easy pickings for Mojo, though once his true nature (and his army of super-monkey henchmen) is revealed, they quickly reverse polarities and set out to give him what-for. This is all an echo of the original show, more or less. What makes The Powerpuff Girls Movie so insanely fun is McCracken's irrepressible style, which combines gobs of pop-culture references with enough primary-colored animation to dethaw even the most jaded filmgoer's sensibilities, and a supremely silly series of running gags that pile up one atop the other until you're barely able to keep up with them all. Retro fun that contains a serious self-empowerment message for little girls and little boys alike, this is brilliant, wacky, and utterly charming fluff, with millions of mad monkey minions to boot. As Ben Grimm would say, “It's clobberin' time!”