Super Visions: Hey! Kids' comics! (Part II)

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My intentions were good, I swear. I was opening Netflix the other night to watch an ep or two of the animated series “Adventure Time” as part of my current examination of kids’ comics and their occasional intersection with animation. And there was a promo for an animated movie from last year that I’d wanted to see at the cinema, but, well, that’s always a tricky undertaking. ?? ?
? So I thought, why not? Reviews had been mixed to good, and I always prefer to make my own assessments. Quickly enough I was enchanted, then laughing, and not long after that I was flabbergasted. How many truly smart films for kids have poop and asshole jokes, in addition to puckishness toward world history, a clever Philip Glass allusion, and voice work from Dennis Haysbert, Stephen Colbert, and Mel Brooks (who has demonstrated his own puckishness toward world history)?
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? Probably just this one. And what’s it called, you ask??

Yes, it’s Mr. Peabody & Sherman, 2014’s feature-length revival of a segment from the ’60s-era “Bullwinkle Show.” For readers unfamiliar with either, Bullwinkle J. Moose was the televised counterpart to Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Newman: the familiar, somewhat hapless fool (or was he …) who gave a face to a collection of largely disconnected and somewhat vaudevillian silliness. Just as Mad warned its readers not to trust mass media (including their publication), “The Bullwinkle Show” never let its viewers forget that it was a television series with paying sponsors whose products might be dubious and whose methods of selling were assuredly suspect. Among the show’s recurring characters were the ingenious and bespectacled talking dog, Mr. Peabody, and his adopted boy, Sherman.
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? The film details Sherman’s upbringing by this canine Nobel laureate, Harvard alumnus, and (secret) inventor of a time-travel device called the WABAC Machine. The waggish and endlessly accomplished Peabody could easily rule the world with his miraculous technology, but instead he uses it to educate his child. Of course, nobody likes a (Mr.) know-it-all — especially, in this case, not a classmate of Sherman’s named Penny. After Sherman contradicts Penny’s rote delivery of platitudes about George Washington (whom the boy had met, after all), she bullies him with unfortunate results that propel the plot.
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? I was already in love with this movie when it did something I really did not see coming, despite knowing that animators love “Jonny Quest” as much as I do: One of Sherman and Peabody’s antic escapes quotes that (personal favorite) show’s closing credit sequence. Thereafter, all I could do was bask in the wonderfulness. The radiantly gorgeous computer animation. The sly-dog metaphor for adoptive same-sex parenting. The Danny Elfman score. The puns (some of which I had to hear twice to get). The Bill Clinton bit. The other great visual quote, one from Abel Gance’s Napoleon. You should bask, too. Kids’ stuff does not come more sophisticated or more delicious than Mr. Peabody & Sherman.?? ?
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