Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie review

Children’s entertainment is often overlooked for its significant in the development of our creative minds. Kid’s media is what ultimately teaches us how to absorb information as adults. When it comes to film, kid-vid teaches us about genre, comedic /dramatic editing choices, as well as important cultural reference points. Children’s literature is equally significant in our developing minds, so when films are adapted from our grade schools’ book-fair catalog it’s worth noting how the translation from one media to another informs how the property is now being marketed to a newer generation. In the case of “Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie” we can see a direct influence from the source material mixed in with the modern comedic sensibilities of the voice talent and screenwriter Nicholas Stoller (“Get Him to The Greek," “The Muppets”).

Kevin Hart and Thomas Middleditch voice George and Harold, two grade-school pranksters who spend more time in school hatching plans to humiliate their grumpy Principle Mr. Krupp (Ed Helms) than they do studying. After school, they hang out in their tricked out tree-house drawing comic book adventures of their superhero creation Captain Underpants. Later, when a prank goes wrong with a cereal-box hypno-ring, Principle Krupp is put into a deep trance where he then behaves as their beloved hero. This is all fun and games for the duo until a real-life mad scientist super-villain named Professor Poopypants (Nick Kroll) is hired to teach at the school, where he plans to implement his devious schemes. It is then up to Harold and George to convince their dazed and deluded Captain Underpants to save the day.

Obviously, all of this is very silly and the movie revels in the source’s juvenile sensibilities. Stoller and company might have internalized the text as a celebration of the class-clown. In this world, science is boring, nerds and teachers and humorless and school assignments get in the way of creativity.  At one point we see that Krupp has even cancelled the school’s arts programs. For me there’s mixed messaging here, both emphasizing the importance of imagination and self-assurance and celebrating crass anti-intellectualism. The worlds of the creative arts and the worlds of academics don’t have to be mutual exclusive, but “Captain Underpants” curiously pits them against one another.

If I’m not analyzing the content as closely, as an animated comedy, the movie’s funny enough. Jokes about underpants, poopy pants and farting orchestras don’t really resonate so much with me anymore, but Stoller peppers the dialogue with occasional clever references and humorous turns of phrase, and the film contains a live-action sock-puppet aside that makes you wish the whole movie had committed to its low-tech charm.

“Captain Underpants” skews fairly young and a lot of its base humor left me cold, but there’s an appeal and whimsy about the world created here that makes it difficult not to fall in line with the movie’s mischievous irreverence.  The voice-actors bring allot specificity to their characters and the textured and stylized animation is easy enough on the eyes to allow for quick cuts, jumpy asides and rapid zooms. I can’t say that this will be a family movie standard in the coming years, but I can that it made me laugh and held my attention better than most films intended for the same audience.

Grade: C+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Jun-2017

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie."

Mr. Peabody and Sherman review

 

            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.

Grade: C+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/March-2014

The Wind Rises review

                 Last weekend saw the official release of Hayao Miyazaki’s final film “The Wind Rises”, a leisurely paced WWII drama about airplane engineering, first loves, ambition and regret. It’s a sweeping melodrama, a fanciful coming of age story, and an emotionally driven historical allegory all in one, and, like many other Miyazaki films, it manages to weave in and out of these modes seamlessly, despite its slightly saggy 126 minute run-time. 

                Working as one of the last auteurs in post-Disney animation, Miyazaki films revel in an organic quietude and classical storytelling, in a time in American animation when loud, fast and 3D seems to be the most prominent aesthetic. “The Wind Rises” takes his hand-painted, reserved technique even further, with an autumnal tone that strips away most of the fantasy elements that made movies such as “Princess Mononoke” and “My Neighbor Totoro” definitive Japanese imports.

                From a young age, Jiro Horikoshi (dubbed in English by Joseph Gordon Levit) dreamed of a magical airspace where he could ride the wings of the crafts built by his hero Caproni, an Italian airplane manufacture from the early turn of the century.  Driven by these reoccurring fantasies, Jiro enrolls into engineering school, where he works late nights to accomplish his goals, with very little social interactions. Later when he and his best friend Honjo (John Krasinski) are hired by the Japanese government to help advance their aero industry and catch up with the technologies of Europe and America, Jiro must reconcile his ambitions for designing the perfect plane, while knowing his inventions will be used in massive acts of violence in the oncoming War.  

                It’s Miyazaki’s subtle power in narrative poetry that really brings to life this multi-stranded story. From early on we know that the hopeful innocents of Jiro’s goals are dimmed in the shadows of their consequences. When he meets his future wife, as he is on his way to his first big job, the serene beauty of the moment is devastated in an earthquake that derails their train and destroys the city around them. Years later, when they meet again and fall in love, their union is compromised when Nahoko (Emily Blunt) is diagnosed with tuberculosis. All the while, their bittersweet romance is gracefully juxtaposed alongside Jiro’s journey through moral tribulation as he and his colleagues reluctantly build deadly war machines for the pride of Japanese nationalism.  

                “The Wind Rises” is a complicated and beautifully executed piece of animation. The craft and attention to the water-color backgrounds and the soft touches it brings to every detail of every frame captures Miyazaki’s wistful tragedy perfectly. However, unlike many of the other releases imported from Studio Ghibli, this is not exactly a ‘fun’ movie, and though there is nothing explicitly adult about it, it’s not really intended for children either. The languid pace of the film is breathy and the scope is both intimate and spacious at the same time. Meaning, it’s safe to say that the sophisticated storytelling of this cartoon would probably have most kids under twelve shifting in their seats, and to be fair, at times, it had me checking my watch as well.  With that said, there’s nothing here that’s begging to be cut but like most movies it could probably benefit from a tighter trim.  Regardless, those who can respect an impressionistic style of animation should privilege themselves to the accumulative power of Miyazaki’s last work.

Grade: B+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/March -2014

Frozen review

               Despite the fact that Disney is still remembered for its quality family entertainment, it has been some time since their primary animation studio has produced anything of lasting relevance. Sure, Pixar, their digital-animation sister company, has occasionally been able to approximate the glory days when  Disney could so perfectly balance sentimentality with  sincerity, in a narratively compelling way, but with the expansion of their ever-splintering markets, the studio’s proper animation department has been on a steady decline for last 20 years.

                “Frozen”, a 3D reworking of Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Snow Queen”, cleverly plays on the nostalgia of the classic Disney musical by simulating the Broadway infected melodrama of films like “Beauty and the Beast” and  “The Little Mermaid”, as well as the visual aesthetics of older selections from their repertoire like “Cinderella”.  But does “Frozen” manage to carve out a niche for itself among the pantheon of Disney standards or is it simply an empty pastiche?

                This loose adaptation of Anderson’s fairytale tells the story of two sisters who are emotionally separated after the enchanted snow-bender Elsa (Idina Menzel) almost kills her younger sister Anna (Kristen Bell) in a childhood accident. Years later, after Anna's been healed and her memory of Elsa’s powers have been wiped, they are reunited at Elsa’s coronation. When Anna announces her hasty engagement to the young Hans (Santino Fontana), Elsa again reveals her hidden powers in an argument, causing her to leave the kingdom in embarrassment, unintentionally cursing the land to fall into a summertime snowpocalypse.  With the help of a burly traveler named Kristoff (Jonathan Groff) and an enchanted snowman named Olaf (Josh Gad), Anna must find where her sister is hiding and convince her to end the oppressive cold weather and come back home.

                Many elements of the trademarked Disney magic is recognizable in this digitally animated princess story. The characters motivations are clear, the animation is visually impressive but never too busy or over-designed, and the musical numbers, though tinted in modern-pop, occasionally reach the emotional heights of the Alan Menken/Howard Ashman collaborations of the early 90s. Without out a doubt, there is no shortage of charm in this movie.  Where the film does lack is in its plot construction and storytelling.

                Much of movie’s conflict has to do with finding mechanical ways to separate or main characters and bring them back together. Because Elsa isn’t the actual villain in this peace, and her character is as distant to us as she is to her sister, we neither fear her nor strive for Anna’s yearning to reconnect. When the final act starts and the true antagonist is revealed it’s already too little too late to properly build adequate tension into the story. The side characters introduced in the middle of the film are cute enough, fun to watch and they keep things light, but the film could have definitely benefited with a more substantial B-plot following Elsa as she is snowbound in her ice castle, away from everyone else.

                As captured in any of the behind the scenes footage of how the old Disney masterpieces were made, you can see that every screenplay was closely scrutinized and subject to multiple drafts and storyboard sessions before they were approved by Walt or any of his fruitful successors. For all of the nostalgic posturing and magical evocation in “Frozen” it ends up feeling more like Disney’s greatest hits than an original piece unto itself. But that isn’t to say that the experience, as surface-oriented as it may be, isn’t totally enjoyable while you’re in the moment.

                What’s important about the success of this film is that people want to like it even if it isn’t nearly as timeless as the movies it’s trying to be.  Though “Frozen” doesn’t totally put Disney back on track it’s at least an admirable step in the right direction.

               

Grade: B -

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2013