Story and tone

The screenplay keeps Pilkey’s first volume as a loose backbone: after a lab mishap fuses Officer Knight’s head with his canine partner Greg’s body, Dog Man becomes the city’s newest law enforcer—quick on all fours but distracted by anything that squeaks. Hastings adds connective tissue by following Dog Man through three bite-sized cases, each escalating the stakes. Chief villain Petey the Cat (voiced with laconic mischief by Sam Rockwell) engineers a robo-rat army, rewrites the city’s traffic lights, and eventually hijacks a blimp full of squeaky toys. The film hops genres with each caper—police procedural, kaiju spoof, sky-high heist—yet never loses its playground swagger. Jokes snap fast, mixing literal toilet humour with meta asides about comic-panel gutters, and Hastings trusts both kids and parents to keep up.

Visual style

 DreamWorks gives up its normal look of typography and a shiny finish and in its place creates the look of a hand sketch that draws on ruled paper. Rulers are barely visible in the background in blue, and math homework is ghostly, this is offset by the crayon-edged coarse quality of the foreground characters. During chase scenes, the camera briefly rotates ninety degrees to simulate Pilkey’s “Flip-O-Rama,” letting the audience feel like they’re riffling pages at warp speed. Lighting remains simple and bright, but textures carry tactile quirks—fur strands wobble like pencil shadings under a document camera.

Voice performances

DreamWorks did not reveal the cast list till the opening weekend. It happens to be the case that the studio was clever. Dog Man is voiced by Pete Davidson, mixing goofy bravado with distractible sniffs. Lil Rel Howery plays Chief, Isla Fisher lends warmth to reporter Sarah Hatoff, and Ricky Gervais purrs sardonic one-liners as Petey the Cat. The ensemble sells jokes that could have felt throwaway—when Petey pauses a monologue to cough up a hairball, Gervais’s resigned sigh lands almost as big a laugh as the gag itself.

Music and sound

The score refuses grandeur, opting for kinetic loops that reset every time Dog Man’s attention drifts. Foley artists add comic punctuation—rubber-chicken chirps as footfalls, page-turn swishes during wipe transitions. Petey’s robo-rats scurry with typewriter clacks, a sly nod to Pilkey’s DIY origins. The mix is busy but not deafening, grown-ups won’t need earplugs, and kids will spot new noises on a second watch.

Themes

A hard heart is covered by surface anarchy. The initially biggest weakness of Dog Man, which is that he would run into everything headfirst, turns out to be his greatest asset once he masters it. The complications with attention are not presented as jokes but obstacles that every hero can overcome by studying. The path of Petey, as well, brings sympathy: he is bitter because he is known as bad kitty, even though it is clear that he is intelligent. 

How to watch Dog Man online

Dog Man is now streaming on Peacock for all subscribers after its 31 January 2025 theatrical window. If you prefer to rent or buy, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV and YouTube Movies already carry the title in 4 K HDR with offline-download support. No other subscription platform has announced rights at this time.

Pros

• Hand-drawn notebook visuals feel fresh amid CG sameness.
• Score leans into playful instruments that suit the property’s DIY vibe.
• The jokes popped quickly like machine-gun fire to different ages levels without smirks.

Cons

• Towards the end, the robo-rat scene of Petey is concluded too quickly that it defuses tension.
• It relies on bathroom jokes a few times and may get tiresome to older viewers.

Final verdict

Rocketing out of the sketchpad and into the screen, Dog Man does not lose the doodle-energy that made the books a currency at playground. Instead of smoothing every crayon line, Peter Hastings leaves rough edges and believe that it carries the charm. A couple of double-time spins are so frantic they are funnier, but the movie never ceases to wag its tail. It may be slapped silly and yowled out by kids, positively glanced at by the adults as a respectful nod to the attention-deficit dilemma, and everyone will leave humming the theme of the kazoo-hero. Still, if you get infected at a crowded matinee or a couple of months later on your favorite sites, Dog Man is an entertaining read about those bad boys who can create the biggest messes because they happen to be clean.