Brace yourself to enter the Captain Underpants cinematic universe. The immensely silly, pleasantly bonkers Dog Man started life as a comic book written by the two primary-school protagonists of Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants books before becoming its own bestselling series: one that’s been notably successful in converting reluctant readers into book fans and even aspiring comic-book artists. Now it’s joined its progenitor as a frenetic and very funny animated film.
Dog Man is born when an accident in pursuit of the dastardly Petey (Pete Davidson), a striped orange cat who terrorises the city, leaves cop Officer Knight and his dog Greg in dire straits. The dog’s body is beyond repair, as is the man’s head, so surgeons have the inspired idea of combining the surviving parts to create a man with the head of a dog. The wordless but heroic result is Dog Man, who proves remarkably effective against Petey while driving his police chief (Lil Rel Howery) and the city’s mean mayor (Cheri Oteri) to distraction.
Never slows for anything as conventional as a three-act structure.
There’s not much of a traditional plot to the rest of the film, just endless iterations of Petey schemes and Dog Man thwarts. A shaggy dog-man story, if you will. What’s fun is all the other stuff: Dog Man essentially adopting Petey’s adorable baby clone (Lucas Hopkins Calderon); Petey’s exasperated relationship with his lab assistant (Poppy Liu); a psychic fish voiced by Ricky Gervais; some buildings coming to life and proving unexpectedly buff. It never slows for anything as conventional as a three-act structure.
Director Peter Hastings, who started his career on the genius Animaniacs before heading up The Epic Tales Of Captain Underpants series, packs the screen with sight gags and finds weird but fun ways to combine Pilkey’s sharp-angled 2D designs and modern animation, so that textured, 3D models occasionally appear to have been scribbled on. Given the success of the books you’d expect the fidelity to the source, but the commitment Hastings and his team show to the anarchic spirit and barmy energy of this series is commendable – the film perfectly suited to its young target audience.