In March 2022, I watched Paw Patrol: The Movie (not in the theater, not even on my computer; but on my phone whilst on the bus during an errand run). I wrote a review/commentary on it in a question-and-answer format shortly after.
Paw Patrol, Paw Patrol! Questions are right here on the double!
No response’s too big, no inquiry’s too small!
Paw Patrol, we’re on a questionnaire roll! So here we go!
Q: So you’re a single grown man, 24 years of age. Why did you decide to watch this movie?
Well, it peaked my interest ’cause I was looking to expand my horizons beyond My Little Pony, whilst staying within the niche of kids’ entertainment. I’m a sucker for quality animation and good story, which is hardly surprising given the movies I’ve watched in the past – Luca, Despicable Me, and How to Train Your Dragon, to name a few. Given how My Little Pony is aimed at a similar age bracket, I felt it couldn’t hurt. I mean, life can get a bit stressful, so watching something cute and fun is great, and this fit the paw-print quite well.
Q: Was there anything that stood out for you – something that made you go “Wow, this movie is cool!”
There were a lot, actually, so I’ll just point out the major ones. Firstly was the integrity of Chase’s backstory and character development, which was fairly well-written but felt a tad cliché, though I’m chalking that one up to personal bias due to having seen so many movies with a higher grade of writing meant for older audiences. Second up is Liberty’s enthusiasm and fangirling over the team and her eagerness to participate in a mission with her heroes, whilst utilizing her own knowledge and abilities, instead of trying to one-up everyone else through imitation – a good score in my character writing book. A third and very critical point was the subtle jokes and references aimed at audience members outside the 3-5 year-old age range, which is a definite point to why My Little Pony was so successful at appealing to young adults. And on a final note, the animation and mechanically technical features of each pup’s rescue gear. More than once during a mission rollout, I felt like someone in the scene-staging department had ripped a page out of the Transformers or Iron Man handbook.
Q: Thoughts on Mayor Humdinger?
On a tier level with other movie villains I’ve watched, oof! Absolutely, cringe-inducingly… terrible. Rubble’s water dish has more depth! But again, toning it down for the intended age range, he is quite comical and portrays the bare-bones, textbooks traits of a crazed narcissist, and given today’s world is rampant with such people I think it’s important that we help our children identify them at an early age, so they can look out for Humdinger’s traits when conversing and forming friendships and partnerships with other people.
Q: Did you find yourself liking Chase more after the movie?
Oh yeah. I like all the pups, but that’s kinda the de facto stance I take when I’m not fully familiar with a franchise and have only seen or experienced it through a singular clip – or in this case, a movie. Its… the state of being fearful due to childhood experiences whilst in a critical situation where the whole damn world is counting on you, in addition to forgetting a important step of the process you’ve done 7,000 times and thus being unsuccessful in completing a duty you were tasked to accomplish… it’s really powerful in delivering a humanizing emphatical experience. To be honest I wouldn’t doubt some parents who watched this with their kids have had a “mirror moment” with Chase in relation to events in their workplaces.
The other moment that drew me closer to this cute shepherd were Ryder’s words of supportive explanation when the two reconciled, which leads to the resonant message of the movie. The virtues of knowing and accepting that failure does occur even to the best and most skilled, and developing an extra layer of confidence to overcome PTSD from past experiences – we shouldn’t be downplaying these to being some “top golden rules” to teach our children through entertainment. Because ultimately, they are universally applicable across the age spectrum, and adults do struggle with this – more often than you’d know.
Q: What’s your favorite pup vehicle?
Generally I like machines that are capable, nimble, and agile, so it’s a tough tie between Liberty’s jet scooter and Chase’s police vehicle. Skye’s helicopter though… know that pink can be rad. For real. That machine single-handedly made me consider getting an FPV drone. I find the vehicles look a million miles better in the movie compared to the show – something I’ll circle back to shortly.
Q: So why don’t you watch the show, if you enjoyed the movie?
That’s a good question, and I’ll answer it with a breakdown of my personal approach to kids’ entertainment. Given my 8-year-long pony run, I have a method which I use. Primarily I look for quality in three areas, and for a second I want to briefly touch on what is meant by “quality”. In this context I define it as the state of being at a level that is digestible for its intended audience while being relatable enough for older siblings and parents. This is because I hold a firm belief that TV shows and movies aimed at children should be watched by the whole family, as watching together is a great way to for parents and their children to bond together – more so when there is a substantial, though not necessarily wide, age gap between the children.
Back to the three areas, they are – number one: story. All the things that stood out for me in this movie did so because they made the story engaging by expanding and extending it beyond the bare-bones, cookie-cut formula that each episode of the show follows. Looking back at My Little Pony, the story formula wasn’t repetitive and cookie-cut. While there was a recurring message of friendship and harmony, the story was told in a way that fluidly showed natural progressive development of the main characters through an everyday setting. Sometimes it would be simply one character asking for help in an environment unfamiliar to their friend, other times it’d be a big catastrophe brought on by a main antagonist or villain. In this way, My Little Pony felt reasonably realistic with an intriguing balance between fantasy fundamentals and universally relatable social scenarios.
Now, I did actually watch about half of one episode of Paw Patrol one day – it was in a meat store (of all places!) where a TV was broadcasting TVO Kids. So I figured I’d just use it as a way to kill time while I waited for my order to be processed. The episode was “Pups Save a Satellite”, the second part of the 26th and final episode in the third season. And yes, I had to Google that. While my view time was brief, it was enough to decently grasp the show’s concepts. It felt too simplistic and “bang-bang-bang” – one quickly executed event after the other. This was only emphasized after I looked up the synopses of several episodes, which had the same title structure and largely covered scenarios that felt simplistically trivial in the grand scheme of realism. It was sufficiently enough for very young minds to identify the core themes of teamwork and helping solve common problems – but nothing higher than that.
Number two is characters. I love the characters of Paw Patrol. They are reasonably diverse, cute, joyful, and have unique personalities with a fair level of depth. And anthropomorphized animals have a greater appeal to me than many human characters, to be honest. But its that depth that I find insufficient within that little 11-minute window, which ties in to the cookie-cut formula I mentioned just prior. To be fair, My Little Pony episodes were over twice as long, which allowed for a heightened level of richness to the story, allowing for more character development and a more complex yet relatable situation with multiple steps. And this goes back to the target audience’s attention span and cognitive abilities to digest a story. Contrary to popular belief, My Little Pony is actually a notch above Paw Patrol on the age bracket ladder.
The third area is animation. The show uses a smooth, “polished-clay” style, which doesn’t hold my attention or interest as much as textured CGI rendered at 4K resolution does. There’s a sense of awe and curiosity with detailed animation, because it shows a greater level of dedication to providing a visual appeal to accompany the characters and the setting they are in.
Now all that sounds like a wordy mouthful beyond the scope of even Rubble’s appetite, so I’ll summarize it: The theme and messages of a kids’ show directly tie in to the formula used to tell the story. With ponies, it was about going through the motions of life and learning about friendship and management of social interaction while on a mission to learn as a student. With pups, its about teamwork when a 911 video call shows up on screen. And somehow, the former delivers a more enjoyable and relatable story experience than the latter, largely due to being for a slightly older audience. The movie’s run time practically forced the writing team to expand eightfold, and so it gave room to have more events that fleshed out the characters more – especially Chase. There’s a precarious balance between the overarching story and his own, really.
Q: You’ve mentioned that you’re a writer. Will you make your own stories featuring the Paw Patrol?
Heck yes. I’m just have a lot of complex original novel ideas and pony stories at the moment. Picture this: if I was in the Paw Patrol universe, I’d be the one needing saving due to being tied up with so many creative idea ropes. It’d be amusing to see what advice these adorable pups could give me in that situation!
Q: A sequel is coming in 2023, titled Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie. Will you watch it?
Absolutely. I love these pups and yearn for another hour-plus-long pup-tastic story. It will be an interesting experience to observe how these characters handle the situation of using abilities that were abruptly and suddenly granted to them, as opposed to the traditional route of superhero power stories where the hero must undergo hardship and strife and incur losses in order to gain said powers. I do hope there will be some degree of gain and observable character development through difficulty and losses at a basic level for the target audience to grasp, for such experiences are critical in righting the wrongs of the world’s Humdingers.