The late Looney Tunes maestro Chuck Jones had an existential rule about cartoon animals.

They could walk upright, talk a blue streak and even have a Flatbush accent, so long as they were fundamentally most concerned with the things a duck, a caged tweety bird or a wascally wabbit would fret over -- not being somebody else's dinner.

The people who revived "Alvin and the Chipmunks" for the big screen took that advice to heart. What are chipmunks all about? Nuts. Gathering nuts. Eating nuts. Occasionally singing.

This is the movie that does what their 1960s and '80s TV shows and later big screen incarnations did not. It shows us how three singing rodents came to live with that exasperated songwriter, David Seville. That's a novel touch that makes this kiddie comic franchise worth reviving.

The 3-D computer-animated trio is warbling away when we meet them -- Daniel Powter's "Had a Bad Day." And gathering nuts. Sure enough, the song is prophetic. Their tree is chopped down. It's a Christmas tree. After a worrying trip to the city, the smart but near-sighted Simon, the food-fetishist Theodore and the trouble-making lead singer, Alvin (voiced by Justin Long, not that you'd know it) wind up with ad-man and frustrated composer David Seville (Jason Lee, no funnier in this than he was as the voice of Underdog).

Some very funny business comes between Dave and the trio as he tries to get his L.A. songwriter's head around his new houseguests.

Dave hears them snore, has an epiphany, and that quaint, Grammy winning hit, "The Christmas Song" is the result. "Please Christmas don't be late."

Tim Hill of "Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties" directed this three-writer script ("Simpsons" and "King of the Hill" vet Jon Vitti's hand is obviously here). The movie dashes off into a Chip N'Sync celebrity plot, a family-comes-first riff on showbiz kids, bubble-gum hip hop (and the producers, David Cross, funny) who suck the life out of teen talent and turn them into Lindsay/Britney et al.

But the stuff that works best is the off-hand interplay between sassy chipmunks and their human guardian.

The effects, blending live-action trickery with digital animation (digital chipmunk in a vacuum cleaner?), are top-drawer.

No, it isn't a holiday classic. But "Alvin and the Chipmunks" nicely blends up-to-date one-liners with the nostalgically sentimental.