“Flow,” the dialogue-free Latvian animated epic that’s been nominated for two Oscars, presents the absurd and possibly actionable case that cats are more resourceful and virtuous than dogs. Fortunately, the more traditionally kiddie-coded animated feature “Dog Man” has arrived to right the scales: While its hero is a formerly human police officer with a Very Good Boy’s head stitched on in place of his own after an explosion injures them both, the movie’s malefactor is Petey, the World’s Most Evilest (sic) Cat.
Dogs: loyal, constant, self-sacrificing, duty-bound. Cats: scheming, unknowable, pragmatic, amoral. Nature is healing.
Adapted from Dav Pilkey’s eponymous series of graphic novels (which he spun off from his “Captain Underpants” books), “Dog Man” is a loving and visually inventive if somewhat exhausting parody of cop flicks, superhero sagas and dog-cat tension. The animation has a texture and dimensionality that occasionally recalls stop-motion, though it doesn’t have the truly handmade quality of the Aardman Animations pictures, for example. If it also lacks the more poetic dimensions of “Flow” or even the contemporaneous DreamWorks Animation release “The Wild Robot,” it has taste enough to abjure the instantly dated needle drops and would-be catchphrases that were once a hallmark of DreamWorks cartoons.
Whether this relative restraint makes “Dog Man” more or less appealing to the young viewer in your life depends entirely on the kid. Indeed, parents, grandparents or other elder chaperones in the audience may find the library of references on offer to be surprisingly vintage. There are explicit shout-outs to adrenaline-pumping 1980s classics “Aliens” and “Die Hard,” and the premise of a family-man police officer being reborn as an unholy hybrid after a grave, line-of-duty injury is straight out of another ’80s hit: “RoboCop.”
“Dog Man” even pays brief homage to that splattery satire by having its half-canine hero swoon over a photo of the family he had as Officer Knight, while howling along to Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” - not the sort of soundtrack cut one expects in a TikTok-era kiddie flick. But the movie doesn’t lean hard enough into tragedy to have Dog Man attempt to contact his former wife and child. Instead, the family-reconciliation subplot belongs to Petey (Pete Davidson), who is inspired by his precocious clone Li’l Petey (Lucas Hopkins Calderon) to explore the kittenhood trauma that drove him to a life of supervillainy. This brings the white-whiskered Grampa (Stephen Root) into the picture, giving Dog Man three generations of felines to contend with.
Screenwriter-director Peter Hastings - who also voices Dog Man’s barks, woofs, howls and assorted canine musings - has shoehorned a streaming season’s worth of plot into this sub-90-minute enterprise, and its caffeinated tempo makes “Moana 2” feel like a Terrence Malick joint. (Pilkey has said that his childhood diagnoses of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and dyslexia informed his career as a storyteller, which he acknowledges in the form of Petey’s robot-henchman character, 80-HD.) Lil Rel Howery gives the most distinct and lively of the film’s vocal performances as Chief, Dog Man’s harried superior. He’s less troubled by Dog Man’s off-leash methods of law enforcement than by the supercop’s habit of fetching the wadded-up balls of trash he hurls in the general direction of his wastebasket.
Because the warden of the Cat Jail from which Petey keeps escaping happens to be the brother of Ohkay City’s Mayor (Cheri Oteri), the mayor looks for a scapepup for these penal failures. Lacking the verbal dexterity to defend himself, Dog Man gets choke-chained off the case, like all great movie cops, right around the end of Act 2. Fortunately, our half-canine hero has as little regard for due-process-bound bureaucrats as Inspector “Dirty Harry” Callahan did in the Clint Eastwood movies.
This, um, doggedness proves to be a boon to the taxpayers of Ohkay City when Petey, seeking reinforcements, revives the previously dead Flippy the Fish, who turns out to be a criminal ally he can’t control. Lacking a substantive education in Pilkey’s books, I assumed at first that Chief’s reference to “a psychokinetic evil fish” was a “Watchmen” joke, but nope, Ricky Gervais’s Flippy, who emerges as Dog Man and Petey’s common foe, is indeed a water-breathing, telekinetic sociopath capable of transforming inanimate buildings into rampaging anthropomorphic mecha-beasts.
If those mad scientists had sewn a cat’s head onto Officer Knight’s body, we’d all be in a lot of trouble.
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Three stars. Rated PG. At theaters. Contains cartoon mayhem, mild potty humor, and dogs and cats living together. 89 minutes.
Rating guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars okay, one star poor, no stars waste of time.