And together they have created the greatest comic-book superhero in the history of their elementary school-CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS!īut George and Harold’s principal, doesn’t like their pranks or their comic books. The only thing they enjoy more than playing practical jokes is creating their own comic books. Meet George Beard and Harold Hutchins, a couple of wise guys. Eight Captain Underpants books have been published in 19 countries and several have debuted at #1 on various bestseller lists. There are over 50 million Pilkey books in print in the U.S. Here’s what the distributor says about their film: “Based on the popular Scholastic Books 8-volume series by Dav Pilkey, launched September of 1997. Lesley Nicol … Nobel Prize Moderator (voice) Nick Kroll … Professor Poopypants (voice) Thomas Middleditch … Harold Hutchins (voice) Get answers to your questions about life, dating and much more. In an increasingly mean-spirited world, the spirit of fun and kindness in “Captain Underpants” is simply a tonic.Teens-Have questions? Find answers in our popular TeenQs section. They’re friendly to other kids and they even do a good deed for Principal Krupp, once he’s himself again. George and Harold are tricksters, but they’re not cruel. There’s a blissful silliness to all this that works on adults and kids alike. When a new science teacher, rendered in the boys’ imagination as Professor Poopypants (Nick Kroll), announces his villainous intentions to eliminate all laughter, the boys and Captain Underpants must stop him. Using posthypnotic suggestion, they get him to behave like their comic-book superhero, making the principal switch between Krupp and Captain Underpants with a dash of water in his face. When he threatens to put them in separate classes, the boys’ sheer horror at the prospect is expressed via a live-action melodrama, enacted by sock puppets.īut then, a kind of magic intervenes, when George manages to hypnotize Krupp with a plastic ring. Predictably, George and Harold land in Principal Krupp’s office a lot. Without that, they keep their sanity as merry pranksters: re-lettering school signs to say rude things and rejiggering an invention by their nerdy schoolmate Melvin (Jordan Peele) so that it fires toilet paper rolls at kids in assembly. They need a looser, more creative learning environment. Neither George nor Harold does all that well in school. He’s the perfect person to adapt Pilkey’s work. They create their own comic books, and their favorite original superhero is Captain Underpants, an egg-shaped do-gooder in immaculate tighty-whities and a cape – thank goodness this is animation – who looks, uncoincidentally, like Principal Krupp, only friendlier.ĭirector Soren’s 2013 animated fable “Turbo,” about a garden snail with a need for speed, was an underappreciated and equally offbeat ’toon. They live next door to each other and hang out in George’s treehouse, where George makes up stories and Harold illustrates them. Kids march into the grim Jerome Horwitz Elementary School – where music and art classes have been canceled – like soul-dead citizens out of “1984.”ĭespite such regimentation, irreverence and a delirious disregard for all things orderly define George and Harold’s approach to life. Krupp (Ed Helms), reads “Hope Dies Here.” When he’s really angry, his toupee levitates a little. It positively bristles with humor to please all ages: A sign on the desk of George and Harold’s mean principal, Mr. “Captain Underpants” achieves a convincingly hand-drawn look in the characters’ chunky oval bodies, in the buildings they inhabit and in the backgrounds against which the action is set. Soren and his animators soften the hard-plastic look of the characters’ CGI faces with a rubbery kind of humanity. The plot of the movie pulls bits and pieces from the first four installments in Pilkey’s 12-book series, which is all about the adventures of fourth-grade pranksters George Beard (voiced by Kevin Hart) and Harold Hutchins (Thomas Middleditch) and their invented superhero, Captain Underpants. Go ahead, take the kids and guffaw with them at the excretory humor (and other amusements) in “Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie.” Director David Soren does a wondrous job of reproducing, in animated form, the riotous comedic sensibility of author and illustrator Dav Pilkey and his “Captain Underpants” books – right down to the squiggly lines and cutout look of the drawings. If you don’t watch out, the evil Professor Poopypants may just zap the laughter lobes of your brains. Honestly, it is just so immature to giggle at toilet humor.
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