Fans of the world of sleepover comics who are already an age and begin to discover the occasional furtive gray hair when looking at ourselves in the mirror, have gone from being looked over our shoulders as the “weirdos” of the class during childhood and adolescence a be embraced by the film industry to be part of the “mainstream”. An unexpected turn of events that, as colleague Jorge Loser reflected on in his text on ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’, has made adults take over superheroes in a certain way.
However, the children’s audience continues to be an indispensable part of the bulk of viewers and, with an ever-increasing offer, the people of DC Entertainment and Warner Bros. have once again appealed to the little ones in the house after the fantastic ‘Teen Titans Go! The movie’; a satire that, without forgetting its main target, did not hesitate to wink one eye —or both— to the tallest section of the stalls.
With ‘DC League of Super Pets’, the Distinguished Competition bets, this time, on the most familiar and white cinema; and it does so with an animated feature film that is far from perfect and that shines among its summer counterparts, but that makes up for its conventional character with adorable characters, animalism, a commendable sense of humor and, above all, a huge heart to bring together several generations of lovers of capes, masks and superpowers in a movie theater.
a dog day
I can’t deny that, unexpectedly, I ended up really enjoying a ‘DC League of Super Pets’ that overflows with charm in each of its scenes. The translation of the superpowered animals from Detective Comics to the screen has resulted in an entertainment of little more than an hour and a half as ephemeral as it is amply effective and unexpectedly emotional in some of its passages —there is a specific scene before which it is difficult to hold back tears—.
From the solid but not groundbreaking animation courtesy of Animal Logic studio —responsible for titles such as ‘The LEGO Movie’ or ‘Happy Feet’— to the efficient staging of the filmmaker duo made up of Jared Stern and Sam Levine, including the soundtrack by Steve Jablonsky and, above all, a design of characters that rises as its greatest virtue, the tape manages to show off its chest among competitors as tough as ‘Lightyear’ or ‘Minions: The Origin of Gru’.
Unfortunately, this cocktail of good technical and creative decisions becomes increasingly intoxicated by the scourges associated with its marked childish character —always speaking from the point of view of an adult—. These include a predictability that artificially dilates its second act by not surprising with any of its dramatic twists, a somewhat watered-down comedy and a narrative routine that cloud an articulated story without big buts.
To all this, in Spain we must add dubbing handicap. While in the original version there are names of the stature of Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, John Krasinski, Keanu Reeves or that queen of comedy that is Kate McKinnon, in Spain, among professionals such as Claudio Serrano, the voices of “startalent” like Nachter, Gotzon or Cristinini have sneaked in. And yes, they sound as bad as you would expect to the point of taking you out of the film—the press release, unfortunately, was in its dubbed version.
‘DC League of Superpets’ is not called to turn animated films upside down or to sneak in among the candidates to scratch an award in their category during the awards season, but, without a doubt, knows very well how to get into the pocket of boys and girls I know they enter their well-intentioned showtemporarily cajoling through multiple references and complicit elbows to the company’s most advanced fans in years.