Knock on Wood

I tend to enjoy animated films usually intended for children that fall into the “silly” or “goofy” categories – usually, if they’re made the right way, these movies appeal to people of all ages, even if their target demographic is on the younger side.

Ro’s Colored Glasses – all credits go to my girlfriend/fellow Knock on Wood contributor Davis Mathis for the name – is a series where I re-examine these films from my childhood with a more refined and educated perspective, and re-evaluate them as fairly and objectively as possible (if there even is such a method). For the first entry, I decided to rewatch Mr. Peabody and Sherman, released by DreamWorks Animation in 2014. I hadn’t seen it in the ten years since its opening weekend, so it’s a prime candidate for revisiting.

Based on the Peabody’s Improbable History segment of The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends (which ran from 1959 to 1964 on ABC and NBC), Mr. Peabody and Sherman has a premise that had to work: intelligent, anthropomorphic dog Mr. Peabody has to unravel a cosmic mess that his adopted son Sherman accidentally created through Mr. Peabody’s time machine, the WABAC. A sci-fi/fantasy story combined with a plethora of educational opportunities about historical matters of all kinds seems like a slam dunk for a mid-2010s animated kids’ movie.

In fact, Mr. Peabody and Sherman was in development for over a decade before it actually reached the screen. It was originally going to be a live-action/animated hybrid (which would have been a disaster in the mid-2000s) before Lion King co-director Rob Minkoff came on board and it became a fully animated feature. It ended up being Minkoff’s first film since The Lion King, and his first fully animated film as a solo director.

Before we go any further, there’s something you should know about me: if a movie has time travel or any adjacent sci-fi concepts, I’m already predisposed to like it. There has to be some catastrophic failure somewhere in the mix – ex: Jet Li’s The One – to ward me away.

Mr. Peabody and Sherman’s biggest flaw is not exactly with its design – actually, it works exactly as designed – but it lies in the fact that it’s made for kids. Not for all ages, but specifically for children…which is not necessarily a bad thing. The story and emotional beats are incredibly simplistic, and there’s not too much depth to be found. This does not make it a bad movie, but it does damage its rewatchability (for those like me, who enjoyed it years ago) and initial watchability for anyone over the age of fifteen.

It’s worth reiterating that I adored this movie when I saw it in a theater ten years ago. I was eleven – perhaps the perfect age for the target demographic – and I loved Doctor Who and weird, random bits of history, so Mr. Peabody and Sherman scratched both of those itches in animated form.

Ty Burrell (a standout in one of my all-time favorite movies, Muppets Most Wanted) voices Mr. Peabody, a visually well-designed character but when it comes to the script, he leaves a lot to be desired; which is ironic, because an opening montage showcases how good Peabody is at everything. He receives college degrees, invents countless modern amenities (including Zumba, apparently?), and is essentially good at everything, however improbable, effectively answering any question of “How can he do that?” that an audience member might ask later in the film with “Because he just can.”

Even if you discount the Mary Sue-ification of Mr. Peabody, he is not the central character. His adopted son Sherman (played by Max Charles, who has continued to voice act in the years since the film’s release) is unquestionably the protagonist, and his relationship with Peabody is put at the forefront. After a sweet flashback sequence set to John Lennon’s “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy),” in which Peabody finds an abandoned baby Sherman in an alleyway (a judge tells Peabody “if a boy can adopt a dog, I see no reason why a dog cannot adopt a boy”), we see Sherman going off to school, where he has a run-in with Penny (Ariel Winter), a bully who mocks him for being “a dog.” Sherman proves her right and bites her, leaving Peabody with no choice but to invite Penny and her parents (Leslie Mann and Stephen Colbert) over to his house for a dinner to make amends.

All the while, Sherman is in danger of being taken away by Miss Grunion (a stocky Children’s Services agent played by Allison Janney), an altogether unnecessary antagonist who exists purely because any film made for children in the present day needs one for whatever reason. There is no personified villain other than Grunion (the conflict becomes that a wormhole has opened up because of the time-travel shenanigans and must be closed), but her presence does not make sense other than being a direction to funnel characters’ anger towards.

I realize I’ve barely written about the time travel – and that’s because it’s not all that impressive. We see Peabody, Sherman, and Penny visit a few different time periods (after Sherman and Penny take the WABAC without Peabody’s permission and run into trouble in ancient Egypt), but there’s not nearly enough exploration for a film that bills itself as a time-travel adventure. There are your standard cameos from historical figures – Stanley Tucci plays Leonardo da Vinci, and Patrick Warburton is honestly great as Agamemnon – but the sandbox never feels properly played in, and the film does not seem interested in textured portrayals of historical events and locations; there are more cultural stereotypes than you might expect, and the time travel is fairly straightforward and not done in any interesting or new way (there’s even a scene where multiple versions of Peabody and Sherman accidentally interact, causing, and say it with me, a hole in the space-time continuum…or something like that).

In the climax, as the wormhole gets bigger over Peabody and Sherman’s home city, historically relevant objects and people emerge for a Bill and Ted-esque sequence of the historical figures coming to Peabody’s defense, in a sequence that seems to exist only to make their previous appearances count for something. What’s ironic is that, narratively, the presence of these historical figures is negligible and does not matter when it comes to finding the solution to closing the wormhole, and it’s more of an emotional climax than an action-oriented one. This ending makes little to no sense, but then again, so does the rest of the film, so it’s nothing if not consistent.

The movie originally worked for me purely because of the time travel. It might seem that I hate it upon revisiting, but that’s not true. Divorced from the starry-eyed idealism of my pre-teen self, I groaned at most of the juvenile jokes (only a few actually made me chuckle), the visual gags came off as forced instead of genuine, and nearly every character is an archetype, especially Sherman, who is the closest thing the film has to an audience surrogate. The animation is great, though – it’s DreamWorks, after all – and there’s something to be said about the domestic father-son conflict juxtaposed over various historical scrapes that the characters need to escape from.

Nostalgia is a powerful thing, and it is perhaps the only thing keeping Mr. Peabody and Sherman from personal obscurity. I’m glad I gave it a rewatch, because it was honestly fun revisiting it after ten years. As I continue to watch more films that would blow my eleven-year-old self’s mind, it’s important to remember the ones you enjoyed years ago, because even if your standards evolve, the stories you loved as a kid will always hold a special place in your heart.

Mr. Peabody and Sherman is streaming on Peacock.