Ready to meet “Dog Man?”
The new DreamWorks Animation film, based on the character created by Dav Pilkey in the “Captain Underpants” books, is nearly here. And you can watch the trailer for the film, which stars Pete Davidson, Lil Rel Howery, Isla Fisher and Ricky Gervais, below, followed by our interview with the film’s director, Peter Hastings.
The trailer highlights the film’s unique visual style, which Hastings described as “high-end handmade” before breaking down his team’s approach to bringing “Dog Man” to life.
Hastings is no stranger to the property; he did a “Captain Underpants” television series and developed a relationship with Pilkey. Hastings told TheWrap the movie is “really about a cop and a dog who get into an accident, and the way that they solve this problem is by sewing the dog’s head onto the man’s body, which sounds crazy and preposterous.” What was fun for Hastings is that, the “Dog Man” graphic novels are presented under the premise that they are written by two 10-year-olds. “That brings with them a certain amount of charm and style and silliness and craziness, and then also Dave brings in a tremendous amount of good-natured subversion and a lot of emotion as well,” Hastings explained.
What’s fun about the trailer too is that once the swap happens, Dog Man has a lot of identifiably dog behavior. It’s not just a human man with a dog head. “His brain is a dog’s brain, but he has physical abilities of a human – he can use a phone, and he can get around where he needs to get to, but he will happily lick your face and chase a ball,” Hastings said. The filmmaker grew up with dogs and would watch their behavior while making the movie.
True to form for many DreamWorks animated movies, like the upcoming “The Wild Robot,” is “Dog Man’s” unique visual style, which harkens back to the “Captain Underpants” movie but also pushes things considerably further. That has to do with production designer Nate Wragg, who worked on the first movie but also worked on the adventurous “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.” Reynolds credits Wragg with the uniqueness of the world, which was animated by partner studio Jellyfish in London.
“We have a bunch of people who’ve really worked at the highest levels of animation coming into to work on this movie, and that has been fantastic,” Hastings said. He refers to the look of the movie as “high-end handmade.” “It’s coming out of the books. A huge part of these books is the style of the book and the charm of that, and the innocence of it and the silliness of it. The design is really guided by the tone of the books. We’re mixing things – you’ll see a scene where the desk may look like it’s got brushstrokes on it, but we’re putting a reflection on it, the way wood would reflect. Or a doorknob looks hand-painted, but it has reflection like brass. I just feel like you can reach out and grab stuff in the movie.”
Hastings, who is making his feature debut, is also super excited about the cast. Davidson, he said, “is great because he has a broad, wild energy, but he’s actually a very sweet guy, and it works perfectly for his character.” As for Gervais, who plays a character who appears later in the movie, “he did a ridiculous amount of line reads that we could never actually put in the movie, but it made the sessions really fun.”
And if you’re wondering why the character played by Fisher is actually Australian, well, there’s a reason for that. “The character of Sarah, the world’s greatest reporter, in the books is Australian, but she doesn’t have any dialect that’s sort of specifically Australian in the books or anything,” Hastings said. “And we were like, Well, so she doesn’t have to be Australian. And then Dave said, ‘Oh, no, no, I have so many fans in Australia. She needs to be Australian.’ And Isla came in, and she knew the books, and she was very excited about it, and she did such a great job.”
When asked what Hastings is most excited about audiences experiencing with “Dog Man,” he explained, “I feel like what I’m what I’m really proud of is the broad range this movie has, that it’s really smart and funny and that we’ve really succeeded in having legitimate emotional moments in it. The end of this movie, it’s a very rich feeling of not just ‘That was fun,’ but that it was meaningful. It’s going to be a great family experience.”
And it’s an experience you can have with your family, when “Dog Man” opens on Jan. 31, 2025
