By Sandra Hall
DOG MAN
Rated G, 95 minutes
★★½
DreamWorks Animation has always said it doesn’t have a house style, which is true. You’d have a lot of trouble trying to prove Shrek and the cast of Shark Tale came from the same gene pool.
Nonetheless, there is a certain mood common to a lot of DreamWorks movies. They have an air of boisterousness together with a cast of animals travelling fast and spraying the soundtrack with street slang – so much so that the studio’s gently sophisticated and rather thoughtful 2024 hit, The Wild Robot, seemed like a weirdly poetic aberration.
Dog Man, however, takes us back to basics. Dog Man himself may not have anything to say, but his allies and enemies make up for that. They’re loud and their pace is relentless.
Dog Man adopts adorable kitten Li’l Petey.Credit: Universal
The film is adapted from a comic book series spun off from the equally popular Captain Underpants books by American author and illustrator Dav Pilkey Jr. The plot revolves at high speed around the adventures of Greg, a former police dog who undergoes a radical transformation when he and his master, Officer Knight, are critically injured in an explosion. An ingenious bit of rescue surgery is performed, producing Dog Man, a canine-human hybrid with Officer Knight’s body and Greg’s head, complete with fully functioning brain.
Afterwards, Greg – or what’s left of him – is deeply depressed, having lost his master and the house they shared, but he still has Officer Knight’s job as OhKay City’s most celebrated law enforcer, and he’s still out to catch the city’s enemy number one, an evil orange cat called Petey with a genius for creating scientific inventions with an anti-social purpose.
Much of what follows goes by in a whirl, but it is possible to grasp a few salient bits along the way. The main ones stem from Petey’s attempt to clone himself and his dismay when the clone turns out to be a fluffy orange kitten with an innocent disposition and an urgent desire to be loved.
Finding it hard to oblige, Petey leaves him in the street in a cardboard box where he’s found by Dog Man and adopted. We’re still a long way from a happy ending, however. There are multiple twists and turns to come, wrapped around the kind of hyperactivity that confuses constant movement with meaningful action. Ricky Gervais voices Flippy, a rogue fish that’s even more wicked than Petey himself, and Isla Fisher is heard as the voice of a news reporter.
The film is well on the way to becoming another box-office success for the studio, which means that young kids must be taking to it – especially if they’re fans of the comic books - but it’s packed so tightly with an excess of everything that its memorable moments are few.
It’s the antithesis of Flow, the unlikely winner of both the Oscar and the Golden Globe for this year’s best animated feature. Made in Latvia, it has animals who express their feelings only with body language and animal sounds, and although they’re running for their lives, there are plenty of memorable moments because its creators believe in the power of the breathing space and because of the dreamily beautiful backgrounds that fill those breathing spaces.
DreamWorks has some wonderfully zany creations to its credit and the box-office receipts to back them up, but this one really strains the relationship. It’s exhausting.
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