Dog Man review – zippy, beautifully constructed family fun

Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie is second only to Puss in Boots: The Last Wish as DreamWorks Animation’s best film of the past decade. Dav Pilkey’s beloved children’s graphic novel series was adapted about as faithfully as possible, fully capturing the puerile (literal toilet humour) and subversive (critiques against the education system’s expressionless rigidity education system) spirit of Pilkey’s work in a consistently hysterical and dynamically-animated treat of a film.

Captain Underpants met children on their level but never talked down to them, revelling in absurd silliness whilst still speaking to their own anxieties, though never so much that the fun risked being spoiled. That ethos transfers over to Dog Man, both the book series which began in 2016 – a spin-off pitched as in-universe comics drawn by Underpants’ fourth-grade protagonists Harold and George – and now the big screen adaptation helmed by Peter Hastings.

The premise is the definition of daft: an evil cat named Petey (Pete Davidson giving a career-best performance) terrorising OK City decides to off his only potential nemeses, Officer Knight and Greg the Dog (both voiced by Hastings), by blowing them up…only to accidentally cause man and dog to be fused together via emergency surgery into the nigh-unstoppable crime-fighting supercop, Dog Man. Following a fanservice-y montage of Dog Man foiling various Petey schemes, the plot eventually kicks into gear as the lonesome Petey decides to clone himself a new (human) assistant. However, his cloning machine starts all clones from childhood – so Petey inadvertently offloads the unwanted kid (Lucas Hopkins Calderon) on Dog Man.

Whilst not as outright subversive as Captain Underpants or some of the Dog Man books, that Pilkey mixture of nonsense and sincerity shines through. Hastings’ screenplay does an admirable kid-friendly job of exploring cycles of parental abandonment, the fathers that eventually step up and adoptive pseudo-parents who want what’s best for the child, with comedy and just enough pathos to earn some sweet heart-swells. Then, right when that drama threatens to tip over into saccharine or slows down the pacing too much, Dog Man will chase it with an action sequence where a robot suplexes a building, or a gag involving a phone company entirely dedicated to informing callers that “life’s not fair.”

Dog Man is plenty funny, albeit less funny or idea-stuffed than Captain Underpants, and drops down a peg for a while once a squawky-voiced Ricky Gervais turns up as a telekinetic fish. But one area where the cop does have a leg up over the cape is in its phenomenal animation. Production designer Nate Wragg and art director Christopher Zibach have created one of the most tactile animated worlds in recent memory, using Pilkey’s childlike illustrations as a starting point rather than a bible.

Their characters have the soft roundedness of fuzzy felt, detailed just enough that you want to reach out and run your thumb along their faces, while OK City’s buildings, cars and various contraptions resemble brightly-coloured play-blocks, rigid yet still worn down from overuse. The decision to animate at a lower frame rate – akin to The Peanuts Movie – conveys the idea of children playing with toys even before a finale which is basically smashing disparate figures into each other with “WHAMMO!” onomatopoeia effects. Much like watching a child’s play session, whenever the humour begins to get a little stale or the plotting becomes a bit exhausting, Dog Man’s animation is there to ensure the joy of creativity wins out.