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Osmosis Jones is a children’s cartoon that is a little more sinister than cartoons made for educational purposes. It gives a further look at the workings of the lower east backside, as well as the Puke Button. These locations are shown through vibrant and sloppy animation, then we cut to live footage of a man named Frank’s (Bill Murray) body.
Frank operates by the Ten-Second Rule, which states that food is safe to consume if it is dropped and picked up within a span of 10 seconds. With the hard-boiled egg in question, Frank also has to consider how the egg is inflicted with a monkey claw, and its shell is grotesquely infested with bacteria. This causes the insides of his body to go into panic mode.
On a cellular level, we meet Osmosis Jones (voiced by Chris Rock), a rogue policeman who is constantly getting sent to his superior’s office for an earful. He forms an alliance with Drix (David Hyde Pierce), a timed-release cold capsule, in a bid to combat a viral infection that threatens to exterminate Frank after Thrax (Laurence Fishburne) unleashes a new and lethal disease. This is the first animated microbiological representation of a buddy film. They must stop the viral invasion together.
The Farrelly brothers (“There’s Something About Mary”) use Bill Murray’s slovenly apathy as an illustration of a man who has neglected hygiene to the point of suffering for it as Osmosis suffers in one of his live-action scenes. For a second, profoundly debilitating disease, he attends a science fair where his daughter, Shane (Elena Franklin), participates. While conversing with a fellow contestant, he discovers that the little boy’s experiment is about cleaning dirty oysters. He is subsequently guaranteed by the boy that the oysters have been cleansed, and he proceeds to eat one.
The animated parts that take up most of the film were directed by Piet Kroon and Tom Sito. To have an idea of how it would look like, consider the travel through the human body made by Dennis Quaid in “Innerspace” (1987) with a Matt Groening (“Life in Hell”) twist. The expression parts of the body as different parts of cities was very creative (the stomach being the airport that circulates flights to the colon; the Mafia in the armpit; lawyers in a hemorrhoid).
Inside Frank, the Mayor (William Shatner) works hard to keep everything the same while being challenged by a “regular” opponent, Tom Colonic (Ron Howard). In another part, the Frank that has not shaved for a while feels bad about being with his prim daughter while trying to impress a science teacher (Molly Shannon) who is unfortunately and literally thrown up on by him due to his experience with a bad oyster. (This takes me to the time Dr. Johnson had to point out to Mr. Boswell: “Sir, he was a brave man who ate the first oyster.”) There is Osmosis Jones, who is inside Frank, who is scared he was too rash in pushing the Puke Button.
Who is the audience for the movie? Regardless of my explanations, it is not as disgusting as the normal the effort and refrains from exploring molded meat locations. It was first given a PG-13 rating, later dropped to a PG after a few cuts, and is sure to appeal to children, who appear to appreciate jokes about bodily plumbing. For grown-ups, there is the exuberance of the animation and the energy of the entire film, which is sheer brilliance.
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