Review: 'Powerpuff Girls Rule!!!'

The fourth series to be developed out of Cartoon Network's "World Premiere Toons" (after "Cow and Chicken," "Johnny Bravo" and "Dexter's Laboratory," on which McCracken worked for pal Genndy Tartakovsky, who later worked on "Powerpuff"), it was the one that struck fire. Within a couple of years, the Powerpuff Girls were branding not only the usual clothes, games and backpacks, but also a commercial airliner (a Delta 737) and an entrant in the Daytona 500. When I visited the CN Burbank office-studio in 2000, an entire floor had been given over to the series.

The new episode, which is called "Powerpuff Girls Rule!!!," is both perfectly in the spirit of what has gone before and, like any special edition of any series, a little apart from it. Notably, it has been computer-animated in Flash (like McCracken's current "Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends," and by the same team) and looks unusually pristine and crystalline, though not at the expense of its original timing, compositional weight and unique (if highly allusive) visual grammar. (McCracken studied his own show's first season in order to get it right and played with the software to preserve the handmade feel.) (McCracken addresses some of the technical issues in this interview with the website Cold Hard Flash.)

The story concerns the Key to World Power, which has been entrusted for the day to the city's hapless mayor. Every villain in Townsville turns out to try to make it theirs — I haven't seen this many cameos since the last time I watched "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" — but pride of evil place goes, of course, to Mojo Jojo, the big-brained, turbaned chimp who is the Lex Luthor to their Superman, the Moriarty to their Holmes, the Blofeld to their Bond. He is as loquaciously redundant as ever, which also makes him Polonius to their Hamlet, and denying it as always: "I do not repeat myself like that; I am clear, concise and to the point; Redundancy is not my thing." But you will see a new side to his character here. He sings too — a sad original ballad ("I want to control all the people now/Give 'em my orders and get some action/Be super-awesome and declare/That I — what's the word? — rule!") and Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World." As a crooner, he is a great supervillain.

From a preschool perspective, the series might be called transgressive, since it is a cartoon in which the characters beat each other up and destroy a lot of property. (Collateral damage, thy name is Powerpuff.) But it is also cute (wherefore the merchandise), producing an original mix whose tang is perfectly captured in Bubbles' line about Mojo Jojo (imported from the show for a talking doll): "And I would’ve kissed his little boo-boo, but then I remembered he was a bad monkey, so I kicked in his face."

— Robert Lloyd