Rifftrax Year: 2012
Riffers: Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett
Oh, this one is adorable. If you love animals you just might love this real animal retelling of The Hare and the Tortoise. It might be safe to assume we're all familiar with this story. The slow Tortoise challenge the speedy Hare to a race, and the overconfident Hare accepts. Zipping through the race track with the greatest of ease, the Hare decides to take a nap before crossing the finish line and wallowing in victory, which allows the Tortoise to catch up and win the race.
The moral of the story is "Slow and steady wins the race," though it is almost a bit of a flawed lesson in retrospect. The Hare didn't lose because he wasn't slow, he lost because he was overconfident and underestimated how long of a fucking nap he was going to take. The Tortoise won because of determination and focus, not because of his slowness. That's a better lesson to emphasize when teaching children, to be honest.
This production is done using trained animals playing all the characters, in other words a real hare and a real tortoise. But it's almost a little weird seeing predator and prey being forced to interact, as this poor hare is forced to get up close and personal with owls and foxes during the production. Perhaps they wouldn't attack while trainers were present, but it's a bit funny (or if your PETA, enraging) that it was risked in the first place.
The riffing is very animated, playing with the age-old story and adding their own twists to the narrator and narrative. Occasionally they'll take a jab at the production as well, such as a moment in which a fox looks over his back off camera, and Mike observes "Clearly his trainer is pointing a gun at him." But alluded animal abuse aside this short is a lot of fun, with the cute film itself and a joyously pleasant humor experience. And it ends on just the right note in which the short accidentally cuts off the moral lesson mid-sentence, sending Kevin into a panicked crisis.
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