Dog Man Movie Review

I was definitely a Dog Man kid. I read and reread all of the books (up to Mothering Heights) and when I heard a dog man movie was in development, I was overjoyed. Unfortunately, the film went through quite a few delays, leading to it only coming out this year. However it finally came out, and I found a means of watching it today, so I sat down and watched it, and, it’s really damn good, actually! I think I appreciated it as an adaptation, especially, as I feel like Dreamworks hit the nail on the head when it came to adapting the books and their incredibly fast paced feel. Trust Dreamworks to make a great book adaptation, they’ve proven to us time and time again that they turn kids books into great films that feel exactly like the source material, The Wild Robot and The Bad Guys are great examples of this. I really like the film’s animation, as it really feels like an animated version of the comics, with a rough, hand drawn feel to it, as, in universe it’s obviously comics made by two kids. Funnily enough, I feel like the first Dreamworks adaptation of a Dav Pilkey book was one of the first examples of stylisation in CGI animated movies (mainstream ones, that is) so it does make sense that the animation is quite stylised here. I feel like the voice actors all did great jobs of playing the characters, in ways that I didn’t expect, but does work with their characters. For example, Ricky Gervais as Flippy. It’s not the voice I would’ve pictured for him, but Ricky Gervais definitely fits his character. Also, I respect how they chose to keep Dog Man a silent character, just like in the books. They could’ve gone the cheap route of casting a celebrity to voice him (could you imagine Chris Pratt as Dog Man) but they didn’t, and I think that shows how much Dav Pilkey cares about adapting the source material into something faithful to the original. Also, the story is basically A Tale Of Two Kitties, or whatever the one that Lil Petey comes into it is. There are a lot of sequences that are almost exactly like ones from that book, for example the scene where Dog Man finds Lil Petey and adopts him, and where they bring Flippy’s corpse to life by accident by dropping him into the living spray factory. I also really loved Lil Petey’s character here, he is still the same cute, but sometimes annoyingly curious character like in the comics. He was definitely still a really fun character, and I loved his dynamic with Petey, with Petey warming up to him over the course of the film. I have always loved Petey as a character, with him being a clearly broken character, due to his childhood, but over the course of the books, he slowly heals and becomes a better person, thanks to Lil Petey. I think that the way his character is handled in the books is a really mature way of handling a broken character, for a book aimed at kids, and while this film doesn’t show his whole arc that is in the series, due to this film really only being one book, but he does go through an arc within this film, which I found really sweet, as he slowly warms up to Lil Petey, at first thinking of him as a burden and only wanting to get rid of him, but when Lil Petey finds Petey’s father, after Petey mentions his dad abandoned him as a child, and he sees that his dad is still the same bad person as before, he realises that he wants to be a better father to Lil Petey than his dad was to him, he doesn’t want to become like his father. It’s such a sweet part of the story, and I really felt for him as a character. A really sad but wholesome core in a seemingly lighthearted film. I think the ending feels like a natural conclusion to both Dog Man and Lil Petey’s, and Petey and Lil Petey’s relationships. It feels like Petey does what he does, because he now cares about his kid, enough to let him spend time with the person who he considered his enemy for the longest amount of time.

I think that’s enough to say that I think this film is great, and a really good adaptation of the books, and I would give it a   light to decent 8.