Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie Review

PG: For Mild Rude Humor Throughout

20th Century Fox, Dreamworks Animation

1 Hr and 29 Minutes

Voice Cast: Kevin Hart, Ed Helms, Nick Kroll, Thomas Middleditch, Jordan Peele, Kristen Schaal

REVIEW: The day has finally come. Dreamworks Animation is officially leaving the building — — at 20th Century Fox. After Paramount Pictures received an Oscar for their 2011 animated film Rango in 2012, the studio launched an animation brand and left Dreamworks stranded in a desert. That was until Fox picked them up and carried them back to land. Since the release of 2013’s The Croods, 20th Century Fox has been the distributor for every Dreamworks Animation feature. Since Fox were the ones releasing the Dreamworks films, we’ve got an odd shift of quality. With Fox, they had their treasures with How to Train Your Dragon 2 and Mr. Peabody & Sherman but also had their turds such as Home and The Penguins of Madagascar, but nevertheless, the studio was barely making any money. While more than 500 employees got laid off time after time, in 2016 Universal Pictures bought Dreamworks and put them under the CEO of Illumination Entertainment's Chris Meledandri. Now we say goodbye to Dreamworks and their partnership with Fox with their farewell film, Captain Underpants. Yup, the last movie, THE MAGNUM OPUS of the joint between Dreamworks and Fox is Captain Underpants. 

Ever since its announcement, I was thoroughly pumped to watch this. Between this and Wonder Woman I was more eager to see this. If you were growing up between the late 90s and early 00s, there was a high likely chance you’ve come across Captain Underpants. It was the biggest phenomenon long before Diary of a Wimpy Kid ever existed.  That was the go-to book for every elementary schooler who wanted to read something absurd. Twenty years after the release of The First Epic Novel and 11 more that proceeded afterward, it was inevitable to adapt the books into a feature-length animated film. With Dreamworks, you’re honestly working with the best-animated studio that adapts children books into movies. Before Shrek and  How to Train Your Dragon became bankable franchises for the studio, they both started out as nothing but children novels. With that said, there is no way Dreamworks Animation could mess up Captain Underpants, can they?

George Beard and Harold Hutchins are two overly imaginative pranksters who spend hours in a treehouse creating comic books. When their mean principal threatens to separate them into different classes, the mischievous boys accidentally hypnotize him into thinking that he's a ridiculously enthusiastic, incredibly dimwitted superhero named Captain Underpants.

THE GOOD: Let’s get something straight. If you’re that person, who goes into an animated movie called Captain Underpants and expects Academy Award material, your ass better walk right out of that theater. This film is called Captain Underpants a movie based on a book that was every child’s introduction to taking drugs. I remember reading Captain Underpants and not knowing what the hell was going on, but laughing my butt off of how absurd it was. The best thing about this movie is how faithful it stays to its source material. It is rightfully ridiculous and will have you laughing your butt off at its absurdity. The movie is a high octane sugar rush from beginning to end, and it works. With something like Captain Underpants, you have to maintain the book’s fast pace and frantic randomness. These books were meant for kids and nobody else. It had fart jokes, poop jokes, and every scatological joke known in the book. All of that is in there, and by God, it works. All of this is because of one person, and his name is NICHOLAS STOLLER!  

Though he isn’t the movie’s director, Nicholas Stoller is the writer of this and is the main reason why it is constantly funny. You may recognize that name as the writer of films such as The Muppets, Neighbors 2, The Five-Year Engagement, Muppets Most Wanted, and one of my favorite animated features of last year Storks in which he both wrote and directed. The reason why his writing works in here is the reason why it did in Storks. The movie rapidly fires jokes at you with each second of its running time. Whether it is a visual joke or funny lines of dialogue, it's one of those relentless comedies that is always moving. You don’t want to walk out and use the bathroom here because if you leave for one minute, you’ll miss a lot. In a summer where we have unfunny comedies like Baywatch, this is one of the freshest comedies you’ll see this summer. I had more consistently hard laughs in this more than I did in both Baywatch and CHiPs combined. It has the fast pace craziness similar to a Looney Tunes cartoon. It made me even think at one point, “Why didn't WB release this? Another different studio fully animated this movie so how come Dreamworks are the ones to release it? The movie would’ve had a better place at WB.”

I’m not lying. The reason why this film is uniquely different from every other Dreamworks features is that it's the first outsourced one. Seriously this was entirely animated by a company named Mikros Animation who worked on The Little Prince and is currently working on the Gnomeo & Juliet sequel, Sherlock Gnomes slated for a January 2018 release.

The designs are superbly faithful to Dav Pilkey’s creations. You can tell the style and movement were heavily influenced by Blue Sky’s The Peanuts Movie. Instead of having something like Over the Hedge which was based on a comic and just making it an animated movie with 3D Dreamworks models, this stays faithful to its source by having everything including the movement flow like a comic strip panel. It's so uniquely similar to a comic strip to the extent that it uses expressional outlines when someone yells or move in a fast motion. Besides that, the film even goes on to include different art style that it can. The movie has a great mix of 3D animation and traditional 2D animation. If it's not doing that, then it has cut-out paper art. You see sequences of the Flip-O-Rama come to life. Then all of a sudden they use puppets. Not animated puppets but actual puppets. I know Dreamworks were running low on money but goddamn. There is even a moment when the film becomes self-aware about its budget that it results in using the iconic Flip-O-Rama.

The voices that do work are the adult actors voicing the real adults especially Ed Helms as Captain Underpants/Mr. Krupp. He gets the exact nature of Underpants with his Shakespearian over-the-top tone and the despicableness of Mr. Krupp with his aggressively menacing character. He does an excellent job juggling the voice work of both personalities that lies within this one man. Nick Kroll also does a great job as Prof. Poopypants who is doing a Swedish/Russian voice at a very high pitch which I always imagined this character to sound like.

THE BAD: A great thing I commended The Peanuts Movie for was its voice acting. The Peanuts Movie featured an entire kid voice cast to play these characters who were kids. It would’ve been nice if Dreamworks hired children to do the voices of George and Harold. One of the curses Dreamworks have which we’ll never seem to get rid of, is its voice casting. Ever since their very first film, the studio always had a hard on for hiring nothing but A-list actors to their animated projects. It worked for Madagascar, Over the Hedge, and Rise of the Guardians to some extent, but it failed with Shark Tale and Home. Remember how we were supposed to believe Rihanna was voicing a twelve-year-old in Home? Well, there is no way in hell I am supposed to believe Kevin Hart and Thomas Middleditch are ten-year-old fifth-grade boys. Though their characters and chemistry are the heart of the film, the voices are always distracting. The movie is centered on their friendship, and it works, but then you remember, yeah it's Kevin Hart doing a fifth-grade voice. There’s a sequence where George prank calls the main office lady in a deep and manly voice when you know it would’ve been more efficiently funny if it was an actual child’s voice.

The only person who does the voice of the fifth grader well is Jordan Peele as their classmate/arch-nemesis Melvin. Yeah, the man who made Get Out is the voice of a white fifth grade boy. It's almost like a reverse Cleveland Brown when you think about it (since a white guy named Mike Henry plays Cleveland who is a black man). You can never recognize his voice for he does his best Mandark impersonation (you know the rival from Dexter's Lab). 

For it moving at a fast pace, the movie suffers from two things: 

1) It forgets to have logical continuity. It doesn’t matter whether you are a fast paced animated movie or not; you must always have to abide by continuity. There is a scene where George and Harold get to school after they learn how to change Krupp to Captain Underpants at any command. They go to school at the same time every other kid is getting there. They interact with Krupp, and then three minutes later they turn him into Captain Underpants. BUT THEN THE BELL RINGS AND STUDENTS GET OUT OF THE CLASSROOMS THEY JUST WALKED IN?! It's as if time isn’t existent in this world.

2) There is a lack of focus with its story. Captain Underpants was always books centered on humor than a sequential narrative, but the movie relies on way too many non-sequiturs that you lose focus onto what the movie is trying to accomplish. Not every movie has to have a moral in it, and I respect it for not forcing one down the audience’s throat, but the movie is so all over the place that you wish there were some focus on the story.

Though this film is consistently funny, there are a ton of moments that simply don’t work. The number one gag that never works is when it relies on Hart and Middleditch having to sing at random moments. As I said before, the movie does feature potty humor, but Stoller writes it in a way that is clever and refreshing. For example, there is a sequence where Underpants disguised as Krupp conducts a musical symphony of kids on whoopee cushions, picking their nose, and of course farting. It's a sequence that you groan at, but then all of a sudden it concludes with a visual gag that pokes fun at critics. Moments like that makes it inventive and clever in ways you wouldn’t think it’ll be. The jokes have a 70:30 hit to miss ratio, but opposed to other recent comedies, that’s solid.

LAST STATEMENT: While Infusing a wide variety of different art styles in its beautiful animation, Dreamworks’ Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie is one of the most clever and imaginative animated films to be released this year. Though it lacks focus now and then, it is a hilariously fast-paced summer comedy that is faithful to its equally crazy source material. 

Rating: 3.5/5 | 76%

Super Scene: The Final Epic Battle Against Poopypants