a needless retrospective of Alvin and The Chipmunks
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of guitar and keyboard, must be in want of a singing trio of chipmunks.
Hello, friends. I watched a movie and had thoughts about it. Naturally.
Chipmunked songs. People love them, fight for them, and CGI a bunch of chipmunks to sing them into a 91-minute long jukebox musical movie.
Fair warning, this is not my usual posting style nor content. It’s still me engaging in critical thought, however, I’m being a wee bit goofy as well because this movie broke something in me.
The 2007 live-action film Alvin and The Chipmunks is a cinematic forefather of Despicable Me (2010) in which a single man also comes into possession of three children whom he doesn’t really like but wants to use for personal gain… until he learns to love them, and must fight Evil Villain™️ to get them back.
My friends and I watched this chip-flick on 1.5x speed, and I have a feeling that watching it at true speed would have been torture of the medieval variety, mostly because even at high velocity the pacing felt slow, and the moments that where allowed to breathe most often felt the strangest choices to me.
Couple this with the fact that the movie spends more time on why Alpha “Uncle Ian” (who never loses) is a bad guy than it does showing us why Dave is a good family man, the movie did not really encourage me to root for the chipmunk trio to reunite with Dad—Dave. I said Dave—in the end. He is the better choice of the two, but let’s put a pin in that and ignore for a moment that the word “dad” was invented the day Ian Hawke was born.
Time
Oh yeah, time isn’t real in this movie, at least to me. The Chipmunks wake up in the morning, fail to sing for Boss Ian Hawke, get dropped off at home by Dave, who then is fired within minutes of being in the office and who comes home and suddenly has to prepare for a 7pm dinner date which is apparently “in 30 minutes”. It’s also meant to be winter, but it’s still bright daylight outside. A lot of development happens off-screen and is implied, and said stuff Happens™️ so quickly that my headcannon is, in this alternate reality of the chipmunkaverse, the sun rises and sets in 6-hour cycles. They live in chipmunk-years, and every day is worth 7 of ours.
The chipmunks explicitly tell Dave that they are kids. I wasn’t sure if I should imagine them as rambunctious six-year-olds or something closer to Justin Bieber at fourteen, but given the content of their dancing and performances in the later half of the film, I’m inclined to go with the latter, even though in the1980s media they are canonically about eight to nine years old. It’s a Christmasy film and they’re singing oo-ee-oo-ah-ah ting-tang walla-walla bing-bang (‘Witch Doctor’) while doing body rolls, and at one point Uncle Ian has them smacking their own butts in front of a camera. I wish I was pulling your leg.
Stone-cold killer Ian Hawke pulled someone’s leg once. I don’t need to tell you what happened.
This is normal
For a movie where the main human (Dave) tries to convince himself “I am not talking to chipmunks. I am not talking to chipmunks.” and the villain (Uncle Ian) says “They’re talking chipmunks! Of course people will come”, the movie spends surprisingly little time (read: none) on the impact a trio of talking and musically talented chipmunks would have on the world. I don’t think the movie needed to, but it is a really interesting choice to just side-step that revelation and commit straight to “yeah, they’re like the Jonas Brothers but shorter, hairier, and helium-voiced. What about it?”.
So the Chipmunks became one of the most famous boy bands of their age, kind of like BTS is now. Any skunks that had yet to be signed as jazz singers must have been gutted, but we don’t see this because of the movie’s decidely anti-skunk agenda.
Dave asks if all animals can talk, and Simon helpfully replies that he believes fish “have this type of sign language” which is a neat throw-away concept. Then Dave tells them to get out of his house and that their talking makes him want them out of his house “that much more” because “it’s creepy. Unnatural. Somewhat evil.” But they’re basically like your favourite boy band, so the fact of their chipmunkhood is not really here nor there after that.
Except for the racism. It’s important that they’re chipmunks because other animals suck. Rabbits and skunks are explicitly called “filthy creatures” and the chipmunks claim they “never associate with them”, which is meant to be comedy but really has me wondering about the social systems and socio-economics of the animal kingdom in this universe, what their prejudices are and how they came to be, if chipmunks are an oppressor or part of an oppressed under class.
They react negatively to Dave accidentally almost calling them “rodents”, which tells us that, like Christmas, they have some understanding of human biases, beliefs, and practices. I wondered if the chipmunks were pretending to hate on skunks to relate to the man in power, the one who has the cushy house and so much food that they’d no longer have to hoard, or if the discrimination was real. (Alpha Ian Hawke doesn’t see species, he exploits everyone like the true king he is.)
“Am I exploiting kids?” I did not think to myself. — Dave
After this interaction, Dave negotiates the perfect scenario: “You guys sing my songs, you get to sleep here.” It’s a win-win. Grown Adult Human Dave gets a record deal, Tiny Child Chipmunks get a roof over their heads. As far as the movie is concerned, there is nothing questionable about the power dynamics here; They’re just guys being dudes. Unionless dudes. Unionless guys being dudes who want to sing about Christmas, the season notorious for joy, love, and bringing family together.
Sorry, did I forget to mention that this movie is kind of a Christmas film? Yeah—Human Dave gets the Child Chipmunks savings bonds for Christmas. Uncle Ian gives them stuff they can play with because at least he recognises that they might actually like toys. (Fun fact: Ian Hawke once gave someone a gift box, and that day marks the beginning of the tradition of gift-giving during the holiday season.)
This is an interesting reveal of character in my opinion, because while Dave has, by then, spent at least a few days with the Child Chipmunks, and presumably should know what they’re like, what they like, and how they’d like it. They got him fired from his job because they drew butt doodles on his presentation, so crayons? They run around and eat snacks, so cheese puffs? They act like children, so… But Dave is more invested in their future, and acts as if he is an impersonal music agent rather than the guy who lives with them, shops with and for them, and who provides for them.
You know, like a friend. “Friends do that,” Dave says.
“Well, uncle Ian says we're like his family,” says one of the chipmunks, because Alpha Ian Hawke, readily invited the three chipmunks into his pack, and this is actually the day the word “family” appeared in the dictionary.
To family or not to family. That is the question.
This is a point of contention in the film, when Dave and the chipmunks have a conversation about whether or not they’re a family. I say conversation, but it’s more a one-sided argument in which Dave is unable to admit that he cares about them, unable to regulate his emotions in order to have a discussion and instead somewhat loses his temper when the chipmunks point out how Uncle Ian treats them. “Well, if you love uncle Ian so much, and don't think I'm watching out for you, why don't you go live with Uncle Ian?” Dave raises his voice, as any reasonable reluctant father-figure would.
Earlier, Simon asked, “Shouldn't we have a say in how to build our investment portfolio?” To which Dave said, “Where is all this coming from? You guys are just kids”, and sure, but this is blatantly ignoring the fact that Dave is the one who got them savings bonds for Christmas and brought up two seconds prior that he’s putting all their income away for them because he cares. Not to be super harsh on Dave, but he strikes me as somewhat controlling—he controls all of the chipmunk’s financials and income, and then refuses to talk about it with them when they ask because they are “just kids”. But I am still meant to like him and be sad when the boys leave him for Uncle Ian’s house, because this is a family film, and cute can-do-nothing-wrong Theodore accidentally called Dave “Dad”.
To be clear, Dave does advocate for the boys and doesn’t want them over-worked, but he’s not painted as a great father figure to me, it’s more that he’s the better choice.
I think this movie can be summed up with the phrase “I didn’t know what I had until it was gone”. I just wish I liked what they had, but what they had was Dave yelling “ALVIIIIIN”, and it was yelled in such a way as to make me think he was dead inside, but that could have just been me projecting.
Uncle Ian proves to be less of a family man than he seemed; he takes away Simon’s glasses and gives him a new pair, modeled after his own, which Simon says he cannot see out of. Taking away a person's visual aid is an act of ableism that leaves Simon at risk of injury (which actually happens in the seconds proceeding when he immediately falls off a table), but the movie skirts over this very, very quickly.
It’s meant to show how careless Uncle Ian really is, and it’s effective, but I was also sitting there thinking that Dave isn’t that great either even though he originally gives Simon glasses. I thought a bit about narrative prosthesis and how disabled bodies are so often used in this way, to make a point or show an able-bodied person’s moral leanings—Simon falls off the table but then we cut to a montage of them singing and dancing like it’s super easy, barely an inconvenience.
Thinking about this moment made me think about how Dave yells at Alvin. I’m sure plenty of parents get frustrated and lose their cool sometimes, but the comedic yelling of the catchphrase annoyed me because it does nothing except wink at the audience (hey, there’s the line you adults were looking out for!) and ensure that Alvin will continue his shenanigans and that those shenanigans will frustrate Dave. And that’s the draw. That’s the punchline. We all know this. But the fact that Dave doesn’t ever really sit down and speak to Alvin about things in a caring, empathetic, and open-minded way really got in the way of me rooting for their family unit.
Alvin is only able to be his hyper-active self in Uncle Ian’s house, but of course, Uncle Ian is the ultimate exploitative scumbag, so. (Once, he gave someone a dollar in exchange for a mint. That would later become known as the origin of the capitalist system as we know it.)
At least at Dave’s house, Alvin can sleep easy at night knowing he will retire into money because Dave was smart enough to put it away for them. Like nuts for the winter.
Speaking of winter and hoarding nuts, let’s, uh, try and be intellectual about this for a minute.
I’m pretty sure this movie is one big metaphor. At one point in the movie, Dave tells the chipmunks that they don’t need to put food away for the winter because he has so much that doing so would let said food go gross and be wasted. So, Dave withholds his familial love from the chipmunks and himself, just like the chipmunks hoard nuts for the winter. He tucks it away somewhere private, not realising he’s doing it to his own detriment. It’s only when the boys leave and are kept from him and overtly over-exploited by Uncle Ian that he dips into his stores and stops letting it go to waste.
And that’s the end.
The movie closes with Ian Hawke roaring “NOOOOOO” in the backseat of a car, which is cited as the first known breaking of the sound barrier by a human being.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser