Is it just me, or is the premise of the new DreamWorks Animation film kind of creepy? The central character of Dog Man, based on the best-selling children’s graphic novel series by Dav Pilkey, is a creature with a man’s body and a dog’s head. After Officer Knight and his canine companion Greg are injured together on the job and wind up in an emergency room together, a nurse, surveying the damage to the former’s head and the latter’s body, helpfully suggests, “What if we sew the dog’s head onto the man’s body?”
Thus Dog Man is born, just as determined to pursue criminals as Knight was but also displaying Greg’s strong tendency to lick people’s faces, including his irascible — is there any other kind? — police chief (Lil Rel Howery). Since the dog has provided the head, the character doesn’t speak but rather emits canine sounds. It sure sounds like body horror to me, and it makes you wonder why David Cronenberg didn’t grab this for his next project.
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Dog Man
Pilkey must be doing something right, though, since the series — started in 2016 as a spinoff of his similarly successful Captain Underpants — has sold some 60 million copies of its 13 books so far. One of 2024’s entries, Dog Man: The Scarlet Shedder, was the number one bestselling children’s book of the year. So it’s not surprising that the character has reached the big screen, and parents should adjust this weekend’s plans accordingly.
Dog Man’s archrival is Petey, an orange cat who revels in his malevolence and is voiced by Pete Davidson with such bravura gusto it’s as if he was born to it. Petey’s latest plan is to clone himself so as to double his criminal potential, but his plan runs into a snag when he fails to read the cloning machine’s directions in advance. Though he’s able to create a double, it turns out that he has to wait 18 years for it to grow up. What Petey gets in the meantime is the adorable Li’l Petey (child actor Lucas Hopkins Calderon), who immediately starts calling him “Papa” and, like all children of a certain age, responds to everything he’s told with the question, “Why?”
Despite being evil, Petey soon finds himself warming up to his cute little clone. So when Li’l Petey falls into the clutches of Flippy (Ricky Gervais), an even more diabolical, mechanically enhanced and formerly dead fish (read the books if you require further details), he’s forced to join forces with Dog Man, who has formed an attachment to Li’l Petey himself.
Writer-director Hastings, who also provides the voice, or rather the sounds, of Dog Man — including, naturally, “ruff,” and howling along to the song “I’m So Lonely I Could Cry” — infuses the film with clever touches, such as the fake commercial for a buddy crime-fighting show after Petey and Dog Man become unlikely allies. While the humor is obviously geared toward young sensibilities, there are amusing throwaway gags for adults, including Li’l Petey uttering a G-rated version of Bruce Willis’ famous “Yippee ki-yay” line from Die Hard. More surprisingly, the film reaches genuine levels of emotion with its depiction of Petey gradually coming to love his cloned son.
The animation, too, is consistently delightful, densely crammed with visual gags and imaginative flourishes, like a gang of marauding buildings, that well merit the film being seen on the big screen. Among the notable voice talents are Isla Fisher as an intrepid TV reporter, Stephen Root as Petey’s cranky father, and, in smaller roles, Laraine Newman, Cheri Oteri, Melissa Villaseñor, and Kate Micucci. The vocal performances are entertainingly pitched to such an energetic level that the recording booth must have been well stocked with energy drinks.
