Animalympics

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

"In all creatures great and small, there resides a spirit of athletic competition..."

Animalympics is an animated film produced by Steven Lisberger. The film was originally conceived as a pair of specials for NBC to air during the 1980 Olympics (one for the Summer Games and one for the Winter Games), but the American boycott of the Summer games that year put the kibosh on those plans. Lisberger's studio instead released Animalympics in theaters as a single feature film.

The film consists of a series of vignettes representing news coverage of the "Animalympics", which as you can imagine are the Olympics for anthropomorphic animals. The main event is the marathon, in which the two favorites (the obsessively driven goat René Fromage, and You Go, Girl! lioness Kit Mambo) take an early lead... and also take to each other. Other highlights include the rags-to-riches tale of track-and-field alligator Bolt Jenkins, a fencing match that turns into a pastiche of Errol Flynn movies, and a hockey game that almost literally turns into all-out war.

Tropes used in Animalympics include:
  • Acrofatic: Ilsa Blintz the hippo during the Vault section, as well as the elephant acrobat on the uneven parallel bars.
    • Subverted: Ilsa Blintz only gets a score of 4.5 (Keen Hacksaw wonders if that was actually the reading on the Richter Scale), the Elephant's routine ends in disaster (she destroys one of the uneven bars), and Keen Hacksaw does a lap around the track in 46 seconds, and says "Not bad for a fatso".
  • Animal Stereotypes: Played straight in some places, averted in others.
  • Assumed Win: For downhill skiing, Kurt Wuffner, who had disappeared some days earlier; for fencing, The Contessa, who appears out of nowhere, and the Marathon: Rene Fromage and Kit Mambo. Though they were in front the whole way, the twist is that they tie.
  • Award Bait Song: "We've Made It to the Top."
  • Big Damn Heroes: Right after Count Boardeux wins a gold medal in fencing through unscrupulous tactics, the Contessa literally swoops in and shows him what-for.
  • Bowdlerise: TV will occasionally play a version of the movie with a lot of "inappropriate" material removed.
  • Boxing Kangaroo: One of the participants in the boxing match. Of course. Billy Crystal (or is it co-writer Michael Fremer?) voices him mimicking Muhammad Ali.
  • Character Focus: Born out of necessity, due to the four-person voice cast. For all intents and purposes, René and Kit represent the marathon, Bolt Jenkins is track and field, Kurt Wuffner is skiing, and Dean Wilson is the aquatic events. Less broad events get their own one-off characters who are never heard of beyond said events.
  • Chest of Medals: A dolphin, who helps narrate the swimming and diving section, has an impressive set of gold medals.
  • Curb Stomp Battle: The boxing match, which goes thus: The kangaroo hops around the bull a few times, then taunts him by kissing his nose. The bull then grabs the kangaroo by the neck and punches him in the face, sending him spinning into the ropes. The kangaroo then spins back out and catapults himself back at the bull, hitting him in the gut. Then the kangaroo lands a punch to the nose, then to the top of the head. Two more jabs to the nose and an uppercut later, the match is over. The bull was knocked out, the kangaroo only took one hit.
  • Determinator: Everybody, given that this is about winning Olympic events, but René really puts out the image.
  • Disney Acid Sequence: Two big ones:
    • The most obvious example is Dean Wilson's "Underwater Fantasy", a/k/a "the movie's taking a break for a few minutes, so go ahead and grab a snack or use the can if you need to."
    • Rene Fromage's "Love's Not For Me" is the other big one.
  • Elmuh Fudd Syndwome: Barbara Warblers, one of the commentators, has this.
  • Everything's Better with Llamas: One of the soccer teams is a South American pack of llamas.
  • Everythings Funkier With Disco: "Go For It," set in the Noah's Ark disco.
  • Fat Bastard: Count Maurice Boardeaux.
  • Feather Fingers: In an interesting example, The Contessa can still fly although she has upper limbs that are 95% indistinguishable from human arms.
  • Flynning: During the fencing event.
  • Furry Fandom: Quite popular with it, unsurprisingly.
  • Gainaxing: Quite carefully attended to in one scene featuring Brenda Springer.
  • Gretzky Has the Ball: Sometimes they get it, sometimes they exaggerate it, and sometimes there's moments like the "Platform Diving" graphic introducing the springboard diving segment.
  • Hartman Hips: Kit Mambo.
    • Brenda Springer was fairly shapely in that area as well.
  • Hurricane of Puns: Like you wouldn't believe, verbally and visually. The closed captioning even goes out of its way to explain some of them.
  • "I Am" Song
  • "I Want" Song: René's "Love's Not For Me" is sort of an inverse "I Want" Song from the lyrics alone, but the visuals during the number make it more clearly one of this type.
  • Inelegant Blubbering: Ilsa Blintz when she gets a 4.5 on the vault. Also Count Maurice Boardeaux, when The Contessa beats him in fencing.
  • Interspecies Romance: A number of them: Kit and René most obviously, but also a husband-and-wife figure-skating team who happen to be a lizard and a chicken, plus several hookups at the disco.
  • Is This Thing Still On?: A silent example: When Bolt Jenkins watches his former hero utterly bung up the high jump, he looks at the camera with an amused smirk, before realizing he's supposed to be looking determined.
  • Kick the Dog: One of the commentators isn't afraid of letting the loser of the boxing match know that he's let down his coach, family, country, and himself. The bull actually starts crying.

Rugs: And now, you can let me down. (Cut to wide shot, Rugs is standing on the bull's head).

  1. ↑ A pun on "Born in a handbag
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