This article was written for the March ’25 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 348).

The new year in animation starts off on a highly paw-sitive note as DreamWorks’ eagerly anticipated adaptation of Dav Pilkey’s bestselling book Dog Man is unleashed this month on the big screen. Directed by six-time Emmy winner Peter Hastings (The Epic Tales of Captain Underpants, Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness, Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain), the movie tells the story of a hybrid superhero born from a police officer and his clever dog after a lifesaving surgery. The film features the voices of Pete Davidson, Lil Rel Howery, Isla Fisher, Stephen Root, Billy Boyd and Ricky Gervais.

“We had four major goals when we started working on the movie seriously, more than three years ago,” says Hastings, who also voices the titular character. “We wanted to make something that was intelligently silly, a film that was ridiculously cool, sophisticatedly innocent and surprisingly emotional! The keywords for the overall visual style of the movie were ‘high-end handmade.’ I am just so pleased that we were able to achieve all of those things and to make a movie that is smart and funny!”

Dog Man’s origins go back to the first Captain Underpants book, where he was the star of an in-story comic book created by two friends, George and Harold. As Pilkey told Publishers Weekly, “By the ninth book, he was a character showing up in [their] comic. My fan mail started to change. Usually, kids would draw Captain Underpants. Starting with book No. 9, they were all drawing Dog Man. That was one of the reasons why I decided to break out and start a new series about Dog Man!”

Pilkey Paradise

Hastings recalls being very excited about working on this new Pilkey project, because he knew that they were on the same wavelength. “It turned out that he really loved the Captain Underpants TV series,” the director says. “Since we already had a track record of working together, he came on board. Things really started to ramp up in 2021. It took a while, but I never had any doubts that we would be moving forward with this adventure. What made this experience so much fun was that our sensibilities completely hook up.”

According to the director, one of the big challenges of the job was deciding how much of the book series’ tremendous amount of material to incorporate into the feature. “We ended up featuring storylines and characters from several of the books, including the first three volumes,” he says. “The third book, A Tale of Two Kitties, introduces some key characters (including Lil Petey, ADHD and Flippy the Fish), and the emotional life of the series really kicks up greatly there. There are also some bits from the seventh book, For Whom the Ball Rolls.”

 

“I am pleased that we preserved much of the look of the characters and the world from the books but were also able to expand upon it. I also love that Dog Man has these subtle messages about creativity, compassion and generosity.”

— Director Peter Hastings

Producer Karen Foster (Spirit Untamed) recalls that Pilkey only said yes to the project on the condition that Hastings would serve as director. “Dav originally wanted the film to be done in stop motion, but he loved what Peter had done in the TV series, so he wanted him to direct,” she says. “We all wanted our movie to have a high-end, handmade and toyetic quality — things that come to life that don’t feel like they’re completely CG-rendered. I’d describe it as a blend of CG and 2D, where things look a bit rough around the edges, as if they elevated off the page.”

As an example, she points to the simple design of Dog Man’s head. “His head is rendered in CG, but you can still see the eyes and the mouth as line drawings,” Foster says. “The approach is quite different from anything else we have done at DreamWorks. The closest I can think of is what Blue Sky did in The Peanuts Movie … Their look was quite different from ours, but the approach is similar, which was to maintain the hand of the creator, in their case Charles M. Schulz, and for us, it was Dav.”

Hastings adds, “Dav has this amazing way of telling a very silly story and dropping in some big, personal-dynamic moments. There are some emotional moments that are so true to life and don’t necessarily follow the norms of storytelling for kids. A lot of it is also because the Dog Man books are supposedly written by Captain Underpants’ George and Harold … There’s an innocence to them, so they can do and say a lot of things that would sound weird coming from an adult, but they sound perfectly normal, funny and silly from a kid. So, our goal was not to reimagine or change Dav Pilkey’s creations but to expand on it.”

Waving a Tactile Tail

The film’s award-winning production designer, Nate Wragg (Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, The Croods: A New Age), explains that his team’s visual approach took advantage of the advancements in animation technology since Captain Underpants came out over eight years ago.

“Although there are certain similarities because both are set in Pilkey’s world, what’s different is that we went for that handmade, stylized approach,” he explains. “We don’t want the audience to feel like it looks like any other CG movie they have seen. It almost feels like a collage of artistic ideas. We’re leaning into a lot of artistic and illustrated materials and stylized treatments in a CG space, which helped us create this jewel of a movie.”

According to Wragg, although the Dog Man world is seen through the lens of George and Harold’s imagination, it’s a living, breathing universe. “It’s made by the hands of the kids, but we’re taking the characters and their world seriously,” says Wragg. “The boys actually make an appearance or two in it, but we don’t cut out wide and see that they’re playing with a bunch of toys. This is a totally realized world that’s highly stylized, and the characters are living in it seriously even though it’s a wildly silly world!”

Dog Man’s art director, Chris Zibach, who is also a die-hard Pilkey fan, says the wild storylines of the series allowed them to push the visual medium as far as they could. “We could be as silly and flat-out ridiculous as possible, because that’s what the books do as well,” he says. “I remember the first visuals that Nate showed us were already delivering on that promise. The shape design was already silly and ridiculous, and it had fun for fun’s sake written all over it.”

“We don’t want the audience to feel like it looks like any other CG movie they have seen … It almost feels like a collage of artistic ideas. We’re leaning into a lot of artistic and illustrated materials and stylized treatments in a CG space.”

— Production designer Nate Wragg

A Cartoony Collaboration

Zibach says that Pilkey’s books served as the ultimate guide for understanding the amount of detail and realism to bring into their designs. “We had the ability to play in that world and try to represent something that’s both somewhat realistic but also totally follows cartoon logic. For example, when you’re depicting trees or buildings or cars, we wanted to go with the bare necessities in terms of details you need to know that, ‘OK, these are the objects we think they are.’ So, less was definitely more here.”

Hastings can’t wait for audiences to see the finished fruit of their labor. He says he’s been very happy with the responses to early screenings. “We screened an unfinished version of the movie, which still had lots of storyboards. They were big fans of the books and were showing up wearing Dog Man T-shirts, and they seemed to love it,” he says.

“I am pleased that we preserved much of the look of the characters and the world from the books but were also able to expand upon it,” Hastings continues. “I also love that Dog Man has these subtle messages about creativity, compassion and generosity. Our movie is silly, funny and a lot of fun, but I love the fact that it also sends out a very important and emotional message out into the world.”

DreamWorks’ Dog Man premieres in theaters through Universal Pictures on January 31.