Note: I will be pausing the blog for a few months. I’ll certainly be back, but there are a lot of things Ariana and I are getting in order as we go through a big life change.
Dog Man (2025)
Written and directed by Peter Hastings
While making the Star Wars prequels, George Lucas was asked why so many elements seem directly lifted from the original trilogy of films. His response to this was, “It’s poetry. It rhymes.” I’ve come to find that life as a whole is like that. The older I get, the more connections and parallels I can draw between one event and another. In reality, these are just moments that happen to me, but the meaning I personally derive from them turns these interactions into a kind of poetry. I recently had a moment that reminded me of another from nearly four years ago.
Ariana and I have decided that it would be best for us to leave the Netherlands. As freelance workers, our pay is subject to potentially wild fluctuations. While our rate of pay is good, those hours are not as reliable. It’s not exactly a primo moment to return to the States, you know, with the fascism and all. But I don’t fear going back. As Leonard Cohen said, “There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.”
As our time in the Netherlands ends, we have been wrapping things up with our clients. One of mine, a boy I tutor weekly for Math, has been quite sad about the end of our sessions. His parents asked if I would see Dog Man in the theater with him and his father. It is one of his favorite books, so I was happy to come along and share that experience with him.
Just before we left the States for here I was staying with one of my sisters and her children. My niece and especially my nephew absolutely love Spider-Man. They had seen the first Spider-Verse film and several cartoons but never a movie. So, in those final two weeks, we sat down and watched the Sam Raimi/Tobey Maguire Spider-Man trilogy together. It is good for you to watch a film like that with kids. While my tastes have grown beyond spectacle cinema, I understand why it’s important for children. It makes them wonder and imagine. My niece and nephew felt every emotion in those movies, from Peter Parker’s exhilaration from using his powers for the first time to Aunt May’s anger at her nephew when she learned his carelessness led to the death of Uncle Ben. They were the perfect audience for those movies.
So, watching Dog Man with this young man was a similar experience. The energy and pacing of the film are reflected in the name of the villain’s robotic minion, 80-HD. The movie and the books are intended to have a child’s drawing aesthetic. Before I left the States, I introduced my nephew to the idea of folding some paper into a booklet, stapling the spine, and voila – you have your own blank canvas to tell a story. That is what Dog Man is: the story a child tells on those pages. It’s not a movie aimed at me, but aimed at my young friend, who laughed his butt off from open to close of the picture.
Dog Man is based on the beloved children’s book series written and drawn by Dav Pilkey. Pilkey’s previous work, Captain Underpants, is popular but not as huge as I have seen Dog Man become. The story follows a police officer and his dog who, due to an accident, have the dog’s body attached to the human’s head. He attempts to stop the schemes of Petey the Cat and other villains that plague his city. A robust supporting cast eventually finds themselves as allies with any real peril diffused by people treating each other with kindness.
After the movie, my student’s father said, “That was a lot at times.” It is undoubtedly a film paced for kids. I have to wonder, if you showed a film like this to someone from the early 20th century, would they have a stroke and die? No insult to the film, but there’s a certain iPad kid vibe at times, tapping & swiping to the next moment, especially in the film’s opening half. The film’s heart emerges more in the latter half as we get into why a character like Petey does what he does and why he believes he must be an evil-doer. Peter Hastings, the film’s writer/director, has described the source material as “playful anarchy,” I think he’s brought that sensibility to the film.
Of all the recent developments in Western animation, the one I have enjoyed the most is the embrace of stylization. For a long time, every animated film resembled Disney, and when computer-animated films became the norm, they often had a bland, flat look. With Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, audiences are presented with a bold mix of styles, all within one film, to reflect the multiversal nature of the story. Villains like Green Goblin and Kingpin didn’t need to look realistic, and in the case of the latter, modeled off the comic art of Bill Sienkiewicz. Dog Man embraces this idea by making the film a mix of Pilkey’s distinctive art style and a stop-motion Rankin-Bass special.
At the center of the movie is a surprisingly deep exploration of the connections between parents and children. Petey purchases a cloning machine that produces Lil’ Petey, who has none of his father’s rancor towards life. This confuses the villain, who asks, “How come I made you, but you’re not like me?” This question may bring some tears to parents watching along with their kids. In a world that can be so bitingly cruel, it is good for us to see how things are so new and beautiful to a child. They remind us that we don’t have to cling to our fears and that the people and things that hurt us once are often very far behind in the journey of our lives. It’s a theme that elevates Dog Man beyond just another corporate pablum. It’s made by someone who really cares about the material.
My moviegoing companion loved the comedy of the picture. At the start, as we pan across the city skyline, he exclaims that he has recognized various locations and signs from the books. As the comedy began at its rapid-fire pace, he was laughing himself silly. At one point, his father had to remind him to laugh a little quieter. Our theater was nowhere close to being filled, but what would the experience of a packed house for this particular movie be like? I imagine the combined joy of all the books’ fans would be pretty transcendent.
I’ve been going through a period of watching comfort films as we close our chapter here in the Netherlands. It’s good to have those movies from childhood that help soothe you. Superman: The Movie, Steve Martin in The Jerk, What About Bob?, Paper Moon, The ‘Burbs. I’ve also rewatched some that have become comfort films in my adult years: The Royal Tenenbaums, Albert Brooks’s Real Life and Lost in America, The Out-Of-Towners, Armando Iannucci’s David Copperfield. I hope wherever you are, you have those stories that lessen life’s struggle. Stories are essential to our lives; they help us make sense of an often senseless world. I hope that you are sitting with a big bowl of popcorn, laughing your butt off like my young friend.
See you on the other side of the world.
PopCult Reviews 