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“PAW Patrol… are they still a thing?” asks Mayor Humdinger, the villain of “PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie” — a rare moment of irony in a film otherwise unfashionably devoid of it. That lack of second degree should by rights
be charming, in a film landscape where fourth walls are constantly being torn to the ground, but that would be counting without the unsettlingly upbeat pups at the film’s centre, the scourge of parents to pre-schoolers around the world. That demographic will surely produce strong box-office takings for this new installment, which represents something of a step up in ambition for the franchise.
A précis for the uninitiated may be in order before tending to the film itself: The PAW Patrol is a highly trained brigade of six/seven anthropomorphic puppies, each kitted out with colour-coded outfits, gadgets and a vehicle of their own, who go around solving problems and fighting crimes. Think Power Rangers done doggy-style.
As the film begins, the relentlessly chipper puppies — including such apparently interchangeable characters as Chase (voiced by Rain Janjua), a German Shepherd who wears blue, or Rocky (William Desrosiers), a mixed breed who wears green — are patrolling the high seas with their ten-year-old handler Ryder (Henry Bolan), for reasons unexplained. Having put out a fire on board a yacht belonging to a family of TikTokers whom anybody else would have left to their fate, the dogs find themselves caught in a storm that sends them off course, towards an island where dinosaurs still roam free.
That would seem to be a drastic change of register for PAW Patrol, until you remember that there are toys to be sold. On the island, the team makes the acquaintance of Rex (Hayden Chamberlain), a paraplegic dog who has been stranded there for two years and in that time has befriended the dinosaurs and constructed an elaborate treehouse for himself.
Eagle-eyed viewers may spot that that last part is almost a wholesale rip-off of the 2023 animated feature “Kensuke’s Kingdom,” but surely won’t mind that some of that film’s grace appears to have rubbed off on this film’s animation and production design teams. The instigating seastorm is rendered in vivid detail, as is the diverse vegetation on the island, seized with finely differentiated grades of light and shadow. One sequence, in which firefighting Dalmatian Marshall (voiced by Carter Young, and taking on main character duties in this story) adventures into the jungle at night, even feels indebted to “Sleeping Beauty”-era Disney.
But these technical qualities only throw into relief the plastic, uncanny-valley feel of the characters whizzing about this latter-day Skull Island. As disquietingly big-eyed as any Margaret Keane subject, the pups have a horribly unreal veneer to them, like so many yassified Lassies with branded hard-hats and gleaming new trucks and jets in violent declensions of neon. Add to this a gratingly clipped vocal delivery from the kids voicing the puppies — no British child has sounded their T’s like that since the 1950s — and a bunch of “never give up” homilies in the screenplay, and you get a powerful recipe for animation kryptonite.
But worse is to come: the pups, having apparently stumbled upon heaven on earth, and being the incorrigible narcs they are, alert the authorities, leading to a chain of events that brings modernity and destruction to this prelapsarian paradise. Of course, the fault is nominally that of Mayor Humdinger (voiced with commendable relish by Ron Pardo), who, alerted to the island’s reserves of natural diamonds, takes accomplices and a truckload of dynamite to these shores in the hope of making a quick buck.
But the dogs started it. That the film can’t see this is a sign of how muddled its politics are, especially in its treatment of the tension between nature and modernity. Rex’s treehouse is full of lovely Rube Goldberg contraptions and, he boasts, doesn’t have wifi — but the film can’t leave him alone with his pre-industrial achievements, instead supplying him with shiny new gadgetry. Mayor Humdinger is depicted as venal, and is shown polluting the island with his rusted jalopy, but the dogs selling out their fellow animals to news stations are not considered morally wrong, and their cars and planes are cool because, presumably, they’re new. “PAW Patrol,” at heart, is skeptical of what is old and unheroic, and embraces a simplistic, macho, borderline libertarian worldview at odds with its environmentalism, altruism and artistry.
Still, somehow, the film does eventually cohere into a half-decent entertainment, as Humdinger’s greed leads to an environmental disaster that threatens to destroy dogs and dinos alike. Some well-conceived action sequences, set against a backdrop of surprisingly apocalyptic volcanic activity, drum up a fair bit of jeopardy and suspense, and there is even a hint of something like character development for Marshall as he rises to the challenge of saving the day.
Parents are likely to be divided as to whether the fact that the film is aimed squarely at young people, with very little in the way of jokes for adults, is a good or a bad thing. Millennial and late Gen-Z viewers do get one freebie, though, in the form of “Bottle Up”, a new song written by Ed Sheeran for the Backstreet Boys. Those ‘boys’ are in their late forties and fifties now — a comforting reminder, to parents who may be despairing about enduring another entry in this franchise, that all children eventually grow up.
