You know how I said that I had next to no comic book experience, that Blackest Night was my first comic book? Well... that's a half-truth. You see, there was a series of comics I grew up with when I was younger, though I saw them more as books and not comic books. Captain Underpants, a parody of superhero comics by taking their ideas to the extreme... while keeping the stories grounded in an Elementary School (you have no idea how hard it was for me not to write Primary School). They were entertaining books to read, with some of the stupidest, yet somehow surprisingly awesome names for the books such as "Captain Underpants and the Invasion of the Incredibly Naughty Cafeteria Ladies from Outer Space (and the Subsequent Assault of the Equally Evil Lunchroom Zombie Nerds)". I am not kidding, that is the name of one of the books. In the era of Superhero movies dominating the box office (there are at least nine of these movies coming out this year alone), its still somewhat surprising that anyone would greenlight this movie, even if it had a budget that is still somehow smaller then any Illumination movie's budget. No joke, I was genuinely surprised when I learned that this movie existed and I was always curious to see how the end result would turn out. I saw it at the cinema, and did enjoy it, but how well does it hold up now that I know how the movie goes? One way to find out.
The story can be best summed up as a fusion of the first four Captain Underpants books. George and Harold hypnotizing Principle Krump into Captain Underpants in book 1, the giant killer toilet (and then the army of smaller human eating toilets right before the credits) in book 2, Captain Underpants getting his powers in book 3, and the main villain (or rather the Supervillain, as a trend these books go for is that "all adults are evil") of the movie, and no I am no kidding by this, I even got it quoted from the script of the movie, "Professor Pee-Pee Diarrheastein Poopypants Esquire" (who came from the forth book). If this was a youtube video, this would be deemed inappropriate for advertisers. The books themselves tell the story from George and Harold's perspective, two children with a strong sense of humor, overly large imaginations, and know each other so well they know what each other is thinking. As a result of that focus, the stories tended to be very simple, something that is translated well to the movies.
Krump and Poopypants are both deliciously evil in their own ways, such as Poopypants barely hiding his evil agenda, and Krump's love of crushing the souls of children, including getting rid of the entire arts and music program in order to buy a multi-layered steel door. Melvin's a traditional suck up, the rest of the student body is just crowd filler, but considering the focus of the story it works. As for the plot itself, Poopypants wants to rid the world of laughter because people keep laughing at his name. To achieve this, he makes a size alteration ray (I forget the in-universe name), turns a child's robotic toilet into a doomsday device and said child as the neurological power supply for a ray that destroys the part of the brain responsible for laughter. Cause if you're going to do it, you may as well go all in, especially when the event that started this was George and Harrold making a comic book about him. For the first half of the movie though, the plot is that George and Harrold don't want to be put into separate classes, so they hypnotize their cruel principle and turn him into a superhero that fights in nothing but a cape and his underwear. While the big problem of this is that there isn't much of a traditional structure, in that event A doesn't lead to event B which leads to even C etc. Don't get me wrong, those events are there, but they're kinda thrown in as an "oh yeah this is why/ Moving on". "Why did Poopypants come to the school?" Because they're looking for a new science teacher. "Why are they looking for a new science teacher?" Cause Krump fired the last one cause he wanted to be with his family on Saturday and not at school. Its the same kind of logic that says school cafeteria waste is so toxic it's on the level of radioactive material and it can power a giant toilet and give someone superpowers.
A lot of the story simplicity can come down to the tiny budget the movie has, which is something also shown in the animation as it is very basic, even too basic at times. Yet I don't find that a problem, in fact, I love it. While the main 3D animation style looks simple, it also looks like the characters have come right out of the books and the simple style means that they do a lot of movement in the movie. It's really bouncy, very cartoony, like a modern animation version of something like Animaniacs. At points in the movie, the style changes to things like 2D animation that looks like it was drawn with crayons, a jpeg of a tiger for a cutaway gag, sockpuppet animation at one point (which is as amazing as it sounds), even replicating a feature of the books, "Flip-O-Rama" which just alternates between two frames of what would be animated to show the effect of something like Captain Underpants being used as the ball of one of those Paddle ball toys among other moments. There's a genuine charm to these sorts of moments, even if its a way of masking how low the budget was. When the movie does go all out though, like in the final battle, it looks great and has a lot of great moments in it, such as Poopypants flying away on a bee which Captain Underpants (instead of catching him), flicks away. Like with the visuals, the music has an air of "done for cheap" to it, most of the music is predictable license songs but with an original score and an original theme by Weird Al Yankovic (which I've put below).
Is this a flawless movie? No, but a lot of the flaws are going to appear if you were looking for something more. This isn't a Marvel or DC movie, this isn't trying to do more then what a superhero movie is known for. To be fair though, the name of the movie is Captain Underpants The First Epic Movie. Why were you expecting something more? For what it's trying to do, it's a great movie and I am glad I enjoyed it. Next up on the Toy Box is Dinobot Swoop, and next up here is Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity
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