Regular Show: The Movie

The feature-length version of a television series. Mordecai and Rigby work at a park. Neither of them actually works; they look for ways to avoid it. One is a blue jay, the other a raccoon. The narrative never explains this. The film opens in space. A war is going on and a ship is escaping. Then it goes back. Two friends are preparing a science project at school. The point is to get out of physical education. They build a machine. It will rewind time by a very short amount. The machine works. But it does far more than they thought. One person sees it. Ross is the physical education teacher. He takes the machine and uses it for his own purpose. From there the film becomes a story about time. Ross wants to rewrite the universe. A group comes from the future. To stop him. Mordecai and Rigby are chosen. Because they built the machine. From there the narrative takes place in space. Ships, battles, planets and a time machine. The park crew joins in. Benson, Skips, Pops, Muscle Man and the others. What the narrative is interested in is not science fiction but idleness: its idea is that what brought the universe to its end was two people wanting to skip a class, and that the narrative takes none of it seriously. The humour is the series' language. Absurd, sudden, unexplained. The violence is at cartoon level but frequent. The emotional line comes at the end. The friendship is tied to a choice and the narrative changes tone there. The animation is hand-drawn and keeps the look of the series. It had a limited cinema release and spread mainly through digital distribution. J.G. Quintel created the series and here both directs and voices. J.G. Quintel, William Salyers, Sam Marin and Mark Hamill are in the voice cast. Who it is for: anyone who watched the series and likes absurd animated comedy. Who it is not for: anyone who does not know it; no character is introduced and the humour rests on accumulation.