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Season 2 |
Episode Guide
Episodes 1-18
The characters of Chip and Dale were first introduced in a series of animated shorts way back in the 1940s and 50s. They made a small screen comeback in 1989 with the fun kids show Chip ‘n’ Dale Rescue Rangers. Then, in 2017, they were given a CGI makeover for Chip ‘N’ Dale’s Nutty Tales, which was a show primarily aimed at preschoolers.
In 2022, the loveable chipmunks were the stars of their own live-action/animated movie, Chip ‘n’ Dale Rescue Rangers, which was far more entertaining than anybody expected it to be.
In the year prior, Disney+ aired a new animated series featuring the toothy twosome, Chip ‘n’ Dale: Park Life, which has just received a second batch of episodes for Season 2 of the show.
I hadn’t seen the first season of Park Life so I didn’t know what to expect when settling down to watch Season 2. I assumed the show would resemble Chip and Dale’s earlier animated adventures, with cutesy animation, silly slapstick humour, and a few moralistic messages for kids thrown into the storylines.
As it turns out, Park Life isn’t the show I expected it to be. The animation is fine and there’s plenty of slapstick, but there aren’t a lot of educational messages for children. I’m not entirely sure it’s suitable for younger viewers anyway. While it is presumably aimed at kids, the creators of this French-American animated series have made something that is far different to the Rescue Rangers cartoons of old.
For one thing, Chip and Dale don’t speak in these episodes. This isn’t a problem as the lack of voices is a way of making this show suitable for global viewers, without the need to dub dialogue or subtitle the episodes. The cheeky chipmunks don’t need to speak to express their feelings, as their high-pitched squeaks and squeals do that ably enough.
But the biggest difference when compared to their earlier animated outings is the tone of the show. It falls on the side of weird and not always in a good way. In the first episode, for example, the chipmunks get turned into fish after eating fish food. Not only does this bizarre scenario make little narrative sense but it actually errs on the side of nightmarish too, due to a grotesque transformation sequence and a scene when one of them nearly drowns.
In a later episode, the two are attacked by a swarm of bees that transform themselves into scary humanoid creatures. It’s a scene that younger children might find frightening, not least because of the ominous music that is better suited to a horror movie than a kid’s cartoon. The ending of the episode when Chip is forced to feed a queen bee while being repeatedly stung might cause a little bit of trauma too.
Also traumatic is an episode when Chip wants to eat Dale, after watching something on TV that is an animal version of Silence of the Lambs, complete with a cannibalistic creature being wheeled onto the screen with a mask over its face. Adults might chuckle at the image, but kids? And do younger viewers really want to see scenes of Chip, with a crazy look in his eyes, wielding a knife and fork over his friend? I don’t imagine so.
Not every episode is disturbing but more often than not, the humour is decidedly dark rather than being bright and cheery. Which begs the question: Who is this show made for? Park Life is far removed from the Rescue Rangers cartoons which were primarily aimed at the under-7s.
I have no idea what age group Park Life is aimed at – certainly not younger kids, who will be terrified by some of what they see on screen, including the zombie animals in one episode who attack the chirpy chipmunks in a scene that is reminiscent of a similar scene from George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.
Chip ‘n’ Dale Park Life is not the show I expected and it’s probably not the show that many parents are expecting either. As such, it’s hard to recommend this to anybody under the age of 10, which isn’t something I expected to say about a Chip ‘n’ Dale cartoon series!