We were privileged to take three of our grandkids to one of the Alvin and the Chipmunks movies during the opening week of a theater in a fairly remote corner of Southeast Asia. This was the same town we heard a Nashville, Josh Turner song (“Long Black Train”) in a local karaoke establishment. (Our culture does, indeed, make the rounds worldwide.) It was my first of that film series, and I enjoyed watching Alvin, Simon, and Theodore work out alongside their music manager, played by Jason Lee. I’d heard their music, particularly the Christmas offerings, and their voices were as cute as they were there.

The first time I taught environmental ethics (as an adjunct at Elmhurst College west of Chicago in the early 2000s, when I was a bi-vocational church planter), one of the essays in the book the school was using focused on the choice of attractive animals in ad campaigns. It’s not an accident that the World Wildlife Fund builds their logo around panda instead of a buzzard. And it’s no surprise that the Alvin producers built an animated, singing-animal franchise around chipmunks instead of garden slugs. Yes, I know that the Remy the chef in Ratatouille was a rat, but he’s an outlier. 

BTW, in an aesthetics books I used early on at Wheaton, one of the writers railed again animating animals, since they were already animated. He insisted that animation should be confined to such inanimate objects as brooms, such as those carrying buckets of water in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” segment of Disney’s Fantasia as well as the dancing mushrooms in the same film’s treatment of “Nutcracker Suite.”  I think the writer was off base, as evidenced by the charm of countless non-inanimate cartoon characters such as Bambi, Cinderella, Roadrunner, and Wile E. Coyote. 

I don’t remember seeing chipmunks during my SW Arkansas upbringing. The closest we got to them was squirrels, lots of squirrels. My Ouachita biology prof, Richard Brown, called them “rats with furry tails.” As rodents, with continuously growing teeth, if they lose their uppers, which grind down the lowers, the lowers end up piercing the skull above. The same with rats. Nice. Oh, and the same with chipmunks, who are also rodents. Still, I was delighted to see we had chipmunks running around our bushes and carport. 

My wife, not so much. She counted them pests, and, sure enough, they were doing a lot of damage, digging holes around the dogwood she’d planted, tunneling under the netting she’d installed to protect our blueberry bushes, etc. She may or may not have tried rat poison to curtail their activities, but it seems to have only made them stronger. So we turned to cage traps, and they worked like gang busters. (Sunflower seeds were just the trick.) Over the period of a week, we caught eleven of the little darlings, and it was a catch-and-release proposition, not catch and murder, which comforted my soul (and hers too, I think). We made sure to find wooded drop spots at least several miles from our house, two each in Davidson and Williamson counties. And, as we turned them loose and saw them scurry for cover, I constructed happy eventualities in my mind , with their finding plenty of food and water and fresh fellowship with kinfolk. Perhaps, some group singing as well.