When I was a kid, one of my all time favourite book series was The Adventures of Captain Underpants. Not only was the childish humour appealing to me... as a child, but the way the book implemented unique features made them special. They were like, a cross between a children's book, a graphic novel and an activity book. It was up there with Encyclopedia Brown and Deltora Quest as one of my favourite book series. I imagine the same things appealed to a lot of people, because it really didn't surprise me that a Captain Underpants movie was to be released in the 2010s. Imagine the fourth-wall breaking and interactivity of the books implemented into a movie! Okay, that is a bit of high expectations, but I can imagine fans of the books were pretty excited for this, and the late 2010s were the perfect era to make this movie, with animation getting some more recognition, adaptations being the most dominant form of movie and DreamWorks being on their A-Game coming right off the release of The Boss Baby... Yeah. Anyway, with all that said, how is this adaptation of a childhood classic?
The story follows George Beard and Harold Hutchins, George is the one with he flattop and the tie and is voiced by Kevin Hart, while Harold is the one with the T-Shirt and the messy hair and is voiced by Thomas Middleditch. They're two elementary school students who like to pull pranks and make silly comic books about their superhero Captain Underpants. However, their principal, Mr. Krupp catches them pulling a prank and tries to break their friendship apart, by George uses a toy hypnotizing ring to keep Mr. Krupp from breaking the two friends, and in the processes, they turn him into Captain Underpants. While trying to keep him under some control, he ends up hiring the evil scientist Professor Poopypants as the new science teacher, who plans to remove everyone's ability to laugh. I know it may... sound difficult to take a plot like that seriously, but it was all from the book, or... books, yeah this is like The Adventures of Tintin where they adapt multiple stories into one movie, it is mostly adapting the fourth book, The Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants, with a little bit of the second book Attack of the Talking Toilets, as an adaptation I'd put this in the Coraline camp, solid work, but some changes that don't sit right with me. Like, they add in a new character named Edith, who replaces the lunch ladies from the first three books and is Mr. Krupp's love interest, and they omit the bit where Professor Poopypants' home country has everyone named a ridiculous and stupid name. I mean, there are worse adaptations, but I feel like a direct adaptation of the books would have benefitted more.
That being said, character wise it's pretty spot on from what I remember. George and Harold had good chemistry, Melvin was as annoyingly stick in the mud as I remember him from the books, and Mr. Krupp was the joyless authoritarian principal who probably should have been let go ages ago as he normally is. I do feel like they changed George and Harold a bit, I remember them doing pranks on everybody, not just teachers, like they made other students plenty miserable in the books too. This might just be a change because these kind of rule-breaking miscreant bad kids are not really that enjoyed much anymore. I dunno, but we really don't see these kinds of characters in media now. Not that the movie does a bad job of George and Harold, honestly I think I'd rather have been a classmate of these two than their book counterparts. I think my only major nitpick is the voices, this movie falls into the problem that most animation has today, in that the kids have voices that sound almost adult, but most of the other voices are fine. Ed Helms as Mr. Krupp is almost perfect casting, though I imagined him sounding a lot more Gilbert Gottfried or Bobcat Goldthwait-y, though his voice as Captain Underpants was spot-on to how I always imagined it, and then there's Kristen Schaal, who actually doesn't do a typical Kristen Schaal performance, like I recognized her voice, but I did not immediately imagine Louie Belcher or Mabel Pines, so... that's neat.
I definitely have to give praise to this movie in the animation department, I feel like this was the start to the big stylization push that 3D animated movies have been getting recently, I mean after this we had Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and The Bad Guys, so I believe this is, if not the start than at least where the push got rolling. The characters look like three-dimensional versions of the book characters. The animation was bright, colourful and fluid. On top of that, the way they implemented different styles, from simplistic 2D to a more hand-drawn looking 2D to using sock-puppets, it was pretty hilarious. Plus the use of the famous Flip-O-Rama from the books was a nice touch and some nice fourth-wall breaking. The animation is really the best part of this movie for me. Which is honestly kind of sad.
To be fair, this isn't a bad movie, and on the scale of movies I just wasn't that into I'd rank it higher than Charlotte's Web or Bambi, but it was just kind of another Coraline for me, in that it just wasn't really the books. Is it bad? No, and I can't even say I didn't like it. I did enjoy some aspects of it, the characters were pretty spot on, the acting was solid, the animation was great, but it just wasn't the books. I guess I shouldn't be too hard on it, the books were unique and a lot of that unique-ness couldn't really be translated into a movie. It was an admirable attempt, and it really isn't one of the worst DreamWorks movies out there. Do I recommend it? Um... yeah, yeah I think I do. On some level, I do think that this is one of those animated movies that is worth seeing, and can change your perspective on animation. Yeah, Captain Underpants is the movie that can help people respect animation. Well, this was one of the first stylized 3D animated movies, which let people realize you could break away from the typical style that most 3D movies were using, and it also is an adequate adaptation of a children's book, taking a ridiculous concept as seriously as one could expect. This is kind of what I thought that DC League of Super-Pets movie was gonna end up being, but at the end of the day, I don't know if I can really recommend it to that many people. Maybe you'll get more out of it than me.
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