‘Dog Man’ Is Not for the Dogs — It’s for the People
With “Dog Man,” DreamWorks Animation is barking up the right tree.
Like apparently a whole bunch of other parents, I took my 8-year-old and 4-year-old to see “Dog Man” (January 31, 2025) on its opening weekend. My only expectations were to eat (more than) my share of Adam Aron’s popcorn and to watch my older daughter crack up seeing her favorite graphic novel come to life. That first thing definitely happened; the second didn’t. But that’s not because she didn’t thoroughly enjoy “Dog Man” — in our debriefing (emphasis on the brief: “Yeah”), it sounds like she did — but because my eyes were instead glued to the screen.
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“Dog Man,” an adaptation of the Dav Pilkey comic — itself a spinoff of his “Captain Underpants” — was an underdog that over-performed at the box office this past weekend, making $36 million vs. estimates of $25-$30 million. It helped that we are in that generally slow post-holidays period with not much else new for families to watch in theaters. While this isn’t exactly the best time of the year for exhibition, “Dog Man” made the most of the first non-football weekend we’ve had since September.
But the early “Dog Man” success is not merely a circumstance of being the only game in town. The film’s marketing was effective in what it did and didn’t do. The “Dog Man” trailer doesn’t even make a passing mention of “Captain Underpants,” a risk that seems to have paid off in terms of ticket sales. At the box office, “Dog Man” did one-third better on its opening weekend than the very movie in which Dog Man was created, 2017’s “Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie.” (In storyline, Dog Man is made up by Harold and George, the two main kid protagonists of “Captain Underpants.”) Sometimes you think Charlie Brown is your star when really it’s Snoopy.
As of this writing, “Dog Man” has a 78 percent rating among critics on Rotten Tomatoes; it’s 86 percent with the people. “Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie” is Certified Fresh at 87 percent with critics and has a 63 percent among audience members.
“Dog Man” works because it is appropriate for all ages without being juvenile (We’re looking at another dog-cop here: Chase of the insufferable “PAW Patrol“). There are laugh-out-loud moments for adults, and they don’t all rely on some double entendre. “Dog Man” is funny, and like Officer Knight’s torso in Dog Man’s body, it has heart. (The dog’s name was Greg.)
The Dog Man IP is also accessible. Pilkey’s graphic novels are often among the first read alone by kids. The ability for young elementary schoolers to discover and consume the “Dog Man” comics without parental help provides them with a feeling of pride and ownership over the IP. Often, as in my case, it is the kids introducing their parents to Dog Man and not vice-versa. We take for granted how rare that is in the first decade of their lives.
“Dog Man” will get you in and out of the theater — usually with no potty break. It’s a breezy 94 minutes (Thank “D-O-G” backwards) at an action-movie pace. It’s fast with no fat — like a greyhound.
The franchise is purposefully uncomplicated in every way. Within the first few minutes of the film, much like in the first few panels of the comic, we get all the backstory story we need: A dumb (yet formidable, physically) cop and his bright police dog are blown up because the cop is dumb and his dog is a dog. Doctors save their bits by creating Dog Man, an apt name for a dog-man, attaching the pup’s sensible head to the cop’s viable body.
The extended world of Dog Man is as beautifully manageable. The police chief is “Chief” (Lil Rel Howery, who is great) and the mayor is “Mayor” (Cheri Ohteri) — she wears an “M” necklace, lest you forget she’s the mayor. Her city is Ohkay (OK).
The bad guy is a cat — dogs chase cats — named Petey (Pete Davidson), the same as in the books. Petey has a clone/son, Li’l Petey (Lucas Hopkins Calderon). And that’s about it. Any required exposition is provided on-the-scene by on-the-scene reporter Sarah Hatoff (Isla Fisher, who is also very good). Though the other animals talk, Dog Man is nonverbal; his barks and howls are effective, and they are provided by writer/director Peter Hastings himself.
While Dog Man is a relatable cops-and-robbers story (literally), it ventures into gray area. Petey is no “do-gooder,” until he is. He’s a terrible role model for Li’l Petey, until he isn’t. He deserves to be dropped into a volcano from 10,000 feet, until he doesn’t. You see kids, Petey is a product of his environment, a sympathetic antihero doing his best to break a cycle of parental neglect. Think I’m overselling at this point? By the end of the film, though Dog Man and Petey remain nemeses, they’re also co-parents.
That combination of ease and sophistication carries over visually. “Dog Man” looks like what your kid could draw, except, you know, they actually couldn’t. The “Dog Man” front- and back-end animation were handled in-house by DreamWorks, though the majority of the CG animation was done by the UK-based Jellyfish Pictures.
IndieWire’s Bill Desowitz wrote that “Dog Man” the movie “pushes the use of 2D-like graphics even further than ‘Captain Underpants,’ with titles popping up mid-air, a la ‘Yellow Submarine,’ which Petey often interacts with.” Those titles are used for a laugh or to punctuate a point, as a transition, and even just as a device to keep your eyes on the screen. It worked for me — it all worked.
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