Here’s a piece of news that should surprise no American viewers,
given the nearly two-month gap in today’s subject crossing the pond to my local theatres.
With Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie,
sixteen years after Shrek’s huge success made fart jokes an animated feature mainstay,
DreamWorks has made a film that is about toilet humour.
More so, it is about how people unmoved by it are stone-cold automatons,
and it is a breathtakingly humane thing.
Normally I’d leave the animation talk until the appropriate point in the review,
but I feel this must be said now. I’ve talked in the past about how DreamWorks’
recent films have been branching out in different artistic directions. Here's the thing:
though this film does branch out artistically once again, Captain Underpants looks the way it does
because DreamWorks is experimenting in being radically economical with one of their films.
Given their recent financial state, they have every right to do so.
So, at $38 million, it is the studio’s cheapest film ever, not counting their Aardman collaborations.
What they have done, is tailor the film’s visual aesthetic to the resources available.
Restrictions are an important thing for artists, and it has been many a long day since I’ve seen Hollywood –
– though Mirkos Image in Canada did the actual animation –
– make an animated film so stylistically creative as a result of a severely limited budget.
It’s an important direction for American Animation more then ever.
I grew up on the children’s books this flick is based on, though I have not read the recent ones.
The film takes elements from the first four books
and works them into a self-contained narrative, though it borrows mostly from the first and fourth.
So, we have two cheerful fourth-graders, George and Harold,
whose consistent stream of pranks repeatedly irks their harsh principal, Mr. Krupp.
Their other hobby is their own homemade comic series, Captain Underpants,
which is a release for all the dirty humour, wackiness and randomness that enters their minds.
In trying to clear proof of their guilt at a recent prank,
the duo end up hypnotising Krupp into believing he is Captain Underpants.
As if managing a middle-aged man who believes he has superpowers wasn’t enough,
an actual super villain soon steps onto the scene, a certain Professor Poopypants.
Not to say that toilet humour is always the point of a joke or even a scene,
and indeed often several minutes go by with nary a gag of that variety.
But it undermines the film’s philosophy. That philosophy being that the human body is odd,
it makes odd sounds, odd things come out of it, and you can’t deny that it’s all ludicrous and kind of amusing.
On top of that, the film points out that, to paraphrase its own words,
“toilet humour is the lowest form of comedy”, on a few occasions.
To sum up, it acknowledges that, as children grow up, they’ll grow out of this, and it’s important to do so.
It’s not easy to say why, exactly, this reliance on toilet humour bothers me not at all.
I’d wager, though, that it’s because,
rather then simply assuming kids will automatically like fart jokes, and plugging them in robotically,
this film is asking us to think what about that kind of humour could be funny, even if it doesn’t amuse us.
That’s really as far as the thematic analysis can go.
It’s a film resolutely for kids, though I think adults can easily enjoy it as a tribute to those
simpler bygone days of laughing at mad stuff, and having a great friend with which to do the laughing.
On that note, the film is a lovely depiction of pre-teen friendships in school,
so intimate and warm, that being separated into separate classes can feel like the end of the world.
In case it sounds like the film offers lots of wink-wink moments for the adults,
it actually makes no effort at all to speak to anyone older then the age of twelve.
More of it, I say. We all need top-tier sophisticated films from the Pixars of the world,
but I think children need entertainment that speaks directly to them.
After all, I can still remember the delight I picked up from such entertainment.
So hey, better for a children’s film with lowbrow comedy and thin plotting
to be committed and sincere, am I right?
And the visuals just make the film all the more wonderful.
The theory is that this is what these two kids cooked up in their spare time,
which undermines every aesthetic component, and gives it a reason for looking the way it is.
The characters feel like notebook drawings given three-dimensional life,
the backgrounds are soft, and alternate colours are used as contrast to the bright blues.
Even the marginally-jerky character animation just clicks.
The visuals make sense, look different and lovely, and didn’t cost an arm and a leg.
In playing around with mixed media, the comics are in neat faux-crayon animation,
and there’s a wonderfully absurd sock puppet sequence at one point.
Unlike recent DreamWorks films where such stylistic departures feel like they’re been done to experiment,
here it just feels like it’s been done to have fun, and so they fit with the film.
This extends to easily the best meta-joke,
where the Flip-O-Rama action pages from the books cameo, and it feels so right.
Of course, this is all just trivial, lowbrow fluff. The title kind of gives that away.
The structure is shaggy, the plot is paper-thin, and even at 78 minutes bar the credits, it’s a bit stretched.
But it’s the most warm and heartfelt trivial lowbrow fluff,
and even more so for being a film where every cent was spent with the characters and audience in mind.
It does everything it sets out to do with flying colours.
According to my ID, I’m a grown adult, so, given the film’s content,
I can’t see myself actively seeking this film out again.
But with the specifics of DreamWorks’ future direction uncertain, it’s a good place to pause for a while.
Thanks for watching the review, folks. As always, I’m your host, Mike Culligan, of Cartoon Karma.
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Until next time, folks.