I wish I could find something good to say about Captain Underpants but I can't: it's the first movie I have seen in a theatre recently and it is so meretricious that it insults even the intelligence of eight-year-olds, for whom it seems to be intended (we went with our five-year-old daughter to a school-sponsored screening at our local theatre, The Alpine).
Animation is at a new low these days, taking its audience so much for granted that animated movies make less sense than ever. George and Harold, fourth-graders, hypnotize their school principal into thinking he is a superhero and with him they battle their nemesis Professor Poopypants. There are a lot of attempts at toilet humor and some attempted jokes about breaking wind but they fall flat from poor and arbitrary timing, as well as meaninglessness. I have often said that the best humor is the most serious and Soren's film goes out of its way to avoid the seriousness about school and authority figures that could have made this an interesting and funny movie. One of many examples: whenever the principal roams the halls one kid hides in a locker; this could have been funny and even moving if we knew anything about this kid, but we don't. It's another case of so many movies these days that try to be funny but don't know how to structure and time a joke, even if audiences today could appreciate the artistry of a Chaplin or a Lubitsch.
Maybe it is too easy to blame computer use for the dispiriting state of animation today when perhaps it is the fault of the animators, whom one would think would not have to jettison subtlety and the complex palettes of hand-drawn animation and replace them with ugly and claustrophobic nonsensical worlds. Is this what the audience for these films actually wants?
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