You’ve got to love the entire movie premise of a recent film—“Happy Happy Joy Joy: The Ren & Stimpy Story,” a documentary that debuted at Sundance earlier this year—and that posit being completely ignored just a few short months later. In ‘Happy Happy Joy Joy,’ directed by Ron Cicero, and Kimo Easterwood, the central running idea of the doc, among other themes of rebellion and chaos, is that the transgressive brilliance of the 1990s “Ren & Stimpy” cartoon on Nickelodeon was the product of several mad geniuses and auteurs. Chief among them was creator John Kricfalusi who drew, wrote, directed, produced, and voiced several of the characters. But Kricfalusi was about as an unstable genius as they come, and he was soon fired off the show at the end of Season 1. While the doc pains itself to laud the other creators and animators on the series that also went on to have amazing, important careers in animation—co-director Bob Camp among them—without Kricfalusi, the show lost its magic. But also, years later, when Kricafalusi was brought back on board to do the show by himself, the show also suffered without his creative collaborators reeling him in. The “Ren & Stimpy” magic was a confluence of all those specific artisans and auteurs and whenever any efforts were made to replicate the show’s genius over the years without the entire crew—it failed miserably (with lots of hard examples given throughout the doc, even by original Nickelodeon execs).