Based on a series of companion shorts aired during “The
Rocky and Bullwinkle Show”, “Mr. Peabody and Sherman” is another sugar-high 3D
animated spectacle, aimed at keeping your kids quiet, while giving you 90
uninterrupted minutes to balance your check book. Thing is, if you happen to be
a in the same room while it’s on, than you might actually find yourself glancing
up at the TV every now and then and slowly getting sucked into its serviceable storytelling.
I say TV because unless your children are
literally begging you to take them to see this, waiting four months is
absolutely appropriate for the level of care and attention that was devoted to
this production. However, if you do end
up dropping your moppets off at the movies as you enjoy a Cinnabon a few stores
away, you can rest easy knowing that while this isn’t exactly an educationally
focused look at history it at least has some aesthetic interest in its academic
façade.
Mr.
Peabody (voiced by Ty Burrell) is a genius dog inventor with a Harvard PHD and
an adopted human son named Sherman (Max Charles). Peabody is an attentive and playful father but
slightly emotionally detached, asking his son to refer to him by his full name
and struggling to express simple feelings in a simple way. When know-it-all Sherman gets into his first
school fight with a girl named Penny ( voiced by Burrell’s ”Modern Family”
co-star Ariel Winter) he is then threatened to be taken away from his doggy
father by child protective services.
Later, during an over-prepared peacemaking dinner with the girl's family,
Sherman gets the group into a boatload of trouble when he tries to prove his
knowledge to Penny by taking her back in time in an orbital device called The
Way-Back machine.
While
this film jumps from one bouncy, brightly colored episode to another, we are
made spectators of history, reformed as pop-culture mythology, where important
figures such Marie Antoinette, King Tut, and Leonardo DaVinci become theme park
plushies, only expressing broad gestures and flat parodies of their real-life
cultural counterparts. Ultimately, in a “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” kind
of way, this dumbing down of history is fine as long as it at least gives children an
entry point into the rest of the (usually gruesome) truth.
Surprisingly,
what plays really well in this adaptation is the character stuff between
Sherman and his father. The story is structured well enough that we care if
they are legally separated, and the stakes we have in their emotional journey
tends to activate the banality of the time-hopping set-pieces. The film boldly stands
up for non-traditional modern families and when Sherman gets accused of acting
like his father and is then forced to defend himself, swearing that he IS NOT a
dog, we can imagine similar playground fights today, where a minority of
children are forced to defend their parents when their classmates call them a
different three letter word ending in G.
Despite
its clunky plotting , a muddled ending, punny
humor that almost never lands, as well as a host of silly butt jokes that
undermines whatever scholarly intentions this movie proposes to illustrate, this kiddy contraption basically works. It’s unpretentious
and it manages to draw you into the character’s dilemma, even if it is a
restructured, hand-me-down dilemma from “Finding Nemo”. I walked out of “Mr. Peabody and Sherman”
unoffended and slightly charmed, and sometimes that’s more than we should come
to expect from a mid-winter Happy-Meal like this.
Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/March-2014
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