Mr. Peabody and Sherman Review
Set the Wayback Machine 92 minutes.
I think it’s fair to say I see way too many animated movies for a man my age (2 score and 4, although I like to think of it as 308 in dog years. Suck it, dogs! I am Methuselah to you!). This was a fact even before I started doing all these reviews so I can’t use this blog as my excuse. The fact is while chronologically I am middle aged I am a child inside. I don’t mean that in the asinine way hippies like to claim they find joy in everything and yuppies claim they wish they could be. My own childhood was on the bad end of the miserable spectrum and even at 12 I was pretty bitter and sarcastic. No I mean the things I thought were cool back then I still think are cool now. I like to think of myself as a big kid with body hair and a frustrated libido.
Thus I love good animated films. I tend to list my favs every time I review a kids movie so I will skip it. I am also not going to go off on what makes a good kids movie great for creepy grown men who sit by themselves in a theater full of children looking like a henchman to a Bond villain. What I am going to say is as an adult fan of kids movies who sees a lot of them I tend to have a more exacting tolerance for what is good and what is crap and to be honest this film felt really lazy and mediocre.
I suppose I should be honest here. I was not really a huge fan of the Rocky and Bullwinkle show. I found it pun-tastic in a bad way and the only characters I enjoy were the villains (specifically Boris and Natasha and Snidely Whiplash. Snidely is one of the male role models my father failed to provide for me) and since Peabody’s Improbably History had no iconic villains I found his segments really boring and annoying. It was mostly a dog you mostly wish were put down and a super annoying kid you really wish the dog would bite.
So a film staring cartoon characters I have always wanted to punch in the face will have a hard time on my film dissection table right off. I will say this film kept a lot of the elements of the cartoons. Unfortunately they are all the elements I hated. Each segment of the TV cartoon was written in some kind of reverse engineering where they thought of the final pun and then came up with the story. The same seems true for each vignette here. Sherman is still the same annoying kid and handcuffing him to another annoying kid is not making him more appealing. You would think I would like Mr. Peabody as he is a brainy scientist but he is that special kind of brainy that somehow managed to avoid being socially awkward or obsessed with nerd interests (AKA anti girl interests) and I always end up hating those guys for not being ridiculed in 5th grade for showing up for Halloween dressed up as Spock. He should be in my camp but isn’t.
Then there’s the humor of this film. I’m somewhat perplexed as to who it was directed at. I have often said a good kids film needs some jokes for the adults but every one of these jokes was an esoteric historical pun that even a lot of the adults wouldn’t get and those of us who did would find them very ho hum. When you spend 10 minutes setting up a pun and it isn’t really laugh worthy go back to clown college. As a rule I expect good jokes in a film to be funnier than the crap I write in this blog every day. This movie didn’t really live up to my level IMO.
Finally there is the animation. No real thought or effort was put into it. The characters looked like slightly more real versions of the characters from the Incredibles. The problem is those characters hovered dangerously close to the Uncanny Valley and Mr. Peabody and Sherman look like they vacation there. Also the Incredibles was great for 10 years ago but times have changed and animation and the aesthetics have improved. The uncanny nature of them I found really off putting, and the computer generated feel of the animation made these characters really soulless. I yearn for the days of movies done with the help of South Korean slave animators.
The story is of course of Mr. Peaboy and his boy Sherman. In case you never watched his cartoon and aren’t sure who Mr. Peaboy is or why you should care don’t worry. 
He will do an extended monolog of his life and tell you in the most minute excruciating detail why he is like unto God (I mean Dog. Damn my dyslexia. Image courtesy of the Funny T Shirt category). We learn that Sherman is going off to school after being home schooled by Mr. Peabody. Once at school Sherman gets bullied by an annoying girl named Penny (Ariel Winter-Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Speed Racer, Modern Family). I guess all those bullying campaigns have had no effect. Sherman freaks out and bites her, causing Mr. Peabody to get called into the office. There he meets a social worker of some kind named Ms. Grunion (Allison Janney-Finding Nemo, Juno, the West Wing) who has a clear axe to grind and tells Peabody that she is going to do an inspection and if she sees anything inappropriate or dangerous she will immediately revoke Peabody’s custody of Sherman (oh, yeah. In the cartoon the relationship between Sherman and Peabody was never discussed like most young boy/order male traveling companionship relationships from the 60’s. In this cartoon their relationship is VERY CLEARLY defined over and over again. Mr. Peabody is Sherman’s adopted father who insists the Sherman call him Mr. Peabody rather than dad. I can already hear the therapy sessions 20 years down the road).
Actually I’d like to speak a bit about this. The cartoon was purposefully silly and as such didn’t need an explanation as to what a dog and his boy were doing together. By setting up a complete legal case with a judge who may or may not have been tripping on acid when he made the call it just made the whole situation more ridiculous and thus harder to believe.
Mr. Peabody objects and sets out to prove what a great father her is. I mean, what could he do that could possible seem inappropriate for a father, aside from the fact that just the day before he nearly got himself and Sherman killed in the French Revolution, took Sherman swimming in a 16th century Parisian sewer (where Sherman most definitely drank the water), regularly takes him around using a time machine (CPSC approved, I’m sure), drives Sherman around NYC traffic in the sidecar of a scooter, wears no clothes except for a bow tie and glasses, and may or may not lick his own genitals in public? Plus he’s a dog. Let’s hope Ms. Grunion doesn’t find an uncovered swimming pool or hidden porn stash. Also how do you change a diaper with no opposable thumbs? That one is going to keep me awake tonight.
Anyway, Peabody invites Penny and her parents to his place so they can make up before the arrival of Ms. Grunion. After a rough start he charms the parents but Sherman is having a hard time liking or getting along with Penny. Eventually he caves and shows her the Wayback machine. They go back in time despite Mr. Peabody telling him to not even mention it (just goes to show how hard it is for a guy to say no to a pretty girl) and they hit ancient Egypt (for all his genius Mr. Peabody never thought to put a lock on his time machine? My car has a lock).
At that point time machine chaos ensues. They have to go back in time to save Penny. They travel around talking to assorted historical figures (I guess the Butterfly Effect is not in effect. Haw! For that matter every established concept of time travel is more or less thrown out the window, along with anything resembling historical accuracy. Remember when kids movies would at least try to educate? Well, no. Me either. But still). More weird stuff happens and the space/time continuum takes massive blunt force trauma to the head.
As per usual I won’t do my typical rating for a kids movie. The theater was packed and the kids in the audience seemed amused, so I guess it can be counted as successful. I was bored and kind of creeped out by the animation. I showed up late and got crap seats and honestly didn’t care. Another movie for the “Keep the kids entertained” pile but not one I think that adults will collect and want to see more than once. A lazy movie for lazy entertainment. Date movie? Meh. Something about this as a date movie doesn’t feel right. Bathroom break? Well, there is a lot of thinly veiled bathroom humor so odds are it will be on your mind. Most of the Mr. Peabody/Penny’s parents dinner party is of limited use unless you dream of seeing an animated dog reprise Tom Cruise from Cocktail.
Thanks for reading. Noting on deck today so I might just do another Star Trek thing later on. Please follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu. If you have comments on this film or my review please leave them at the bottom. Off topic questions and suggestions can be emailed to [email protected]. Talk to you soon. Have a great day.
Dave
(Note-Mr. Peabody and Sherman image courtesy of the Official Site)
