A movie based on a book that's one joke extended to an hour and a half - and surprisingly, it's never boring.
I think I'm asking myself - why did I, honestly, enjoy this movie more on its own merits instead of on the basis of nostalgia, like
Captain Underpants?
I actually enjoyed the shit out of this movie. It doesn't really have a story; like I said, it's a gag that's sustained over a feature length film, but the ideas are so creative and the jokes never overstay their welcome.
There's a part in
Captain Underpants - which has considerably more story than this - that drags for maybe fifteen to twenty minutes, compared to this one's, maybe ten, near the start of the third half.
I keep pulling back to comparisons to CU, both being the last two movies 20th Century Fox would distribute by Dreamworks before the company was bought by Universal, and they put all their advertising money behind BB instead of CU, and at the time, I was bitter.
But CU and it's books is so self aware, but it's still a book about a man in his underpants and the power of imagination. I think self-awareness in kid's movies today
might be falling out of fashion.
I don't think if I rewatched CU that it would be
terrible, no way, but the main characters are still relatively straightforward. There's no weird hook with 'hey, these two kids make comic books' as there is with 'hey, this baby is a corporate executive!'
It feels that jokes and imagination were first and story was second, because some of the trite "I wish you were never born!" shit that comes out of nowhere is out of place.
I think the reason this got nominated is because it's creative in the confines of what people expect from animation. It makes a mundane world fun through a child's imagination.
Captain Underpants kind of does that but it's clearly a bit more fanatical as there's an actual mad scientist who shrinks a school down and giant Turbo Toilets IRL.
