`Rugrats' take their wet-diaper jokes to France

Movie review

XX "Rugrats in Paris - The Movie," animated feature with the voices of E.G. Daily, Cheryl Chase, Christine Cavanaugh, Debbie Reynolds, Susan Sarandon, John Lithgow. Directed by Stig Bergqvist and Paul Demeyer, from a script by J. David Stem, David N. Weiss, Jill Gorey, Barbara Herndon and Kate Boutilier. 74 minutes. Several theaters. "G" - General audiences.

You can't say that "Rugrats in Paris" doesn't bring that distinctive Rugrats touch to Europe.

As Tommy, Angelika, Chuckie and the other kids leave the plane to explore Paris, one of them is carrying a steaming bag of vomit.

A baby wets its diaper and "wee wee" gets mixed up with "oui oui."

A dog lifts its leg on the Eiffel Tower.

Farts turn into floating green bubbles.

"I thought you could only do that in the bathtub," says an astonished observer.

Class. That's not what you get from a Rugrats movie, and it's probably not what you expect. The first one grossed $100 million, so here's the sequel, again produced by Nickelodeon, which started it all with the "Rugrats" television series.

Still, why does this movie get by with a G while "The Grinch" is rated PG for "crude humor"? "Rugrats in Paris" is sometimes as crass as "The Klumps" and "Scary Movie," and suggests once more that the Motion Picture Association's rating system is due for an overhaul.

As for the new location: There really wasn't much need to take the Rugrats to Paris, because they spend much of their time there in a Japanese theme park where they're entertained by sumo wrestler-waiters at the Sushi Karaoke Restaurant.

This is where the plot finally kicks in: Chuckie's father, Chas, is a lonely widower who wants a wife as much as Chuckie longs for a mother.

Coco La Bouche, a conniving femme fatale - described at one point as "a heartless shrew who hates children," in case we didn't get the idea - turns up to deceive them both.

Chas is impressed that she listens to his poetry and "finds bureaucrats fascinating," but Chuckie, who dreams of becoming the martial-arts star, Chuckie Chan, smells a rat.

After all, she's not the smoothest seducer of father and son. "Which is which again?," she asks.

Occasionally there's a line that actually has something to do with the French, though it's usually from a dopey-American perspective ("I love their fries and everything"). It took a team of five writers to come up with lines like that.

When the writers aren't preoccupied with poop and booger and laxative jokes, they do have some fun sending up "Jurassic Park" and "The Godfather" (the opening scene casts the bratty Angelika in Brando's role) and "Lady and the Tramp" (the romance of Disney's spaghetti-eating episode is thoroughly trashed).

In the most promising episode, they also question the strange proliferation of such masochistic-romantic stage musicals as "Phantom of the Opera" and "Beauty and the Beast."

Here a Japanese princess sings love songs to a fire-eating "Reptar" that resembles Godzilla and climbs the Eiffel Tower.

The animation is less crude than in the first "Rugrats Movie," and the celebrity voices are higher-profile (Susan Sarandon plays Coco, John Lithgow is her sidekick, and Debbie Reynolds plays an energetic senior citizen called Lulu Pickles). But you really can't take these kids anywhere.