The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Dreamworks' second entry of 2017, "Captain Underpants" is a rather low budget animated feature from the colossal studio with nearing "only" 40$ million, but still displayed crisp animation without heavy funds. For that matter alone, the movie should be acclaimed, but regrettable the finite result is not sufficiently well put together. The movie is adapted from a vast children novel series created by Dav Pilkey with more than 15 overall books under its sphere."Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie" revolves around two fourth grade pranksters (voiced by Kevin Hart and Thomas Middleditch) whose imagination fabricate a superhero in the form of their mean school principal, dubbed "Captain Underpants" after their comic books.The screenwriters do a good job telling the origin story of Captain Underpants and how it all came to be, however the film is lacking laughs and giggles with some of the jokes being quite childish. Given the fact that Dreamworks released "The Boss Baby" is the same year, they are probably going for that same type of humor and target the same demographic that made it a box office hit. Although I have to admit I laughed every time the word "Hahaguffawchucklealamus" was spoken."Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie" is a decent animated feature film for children, but the adults may not find it as entertaining.

I was hoping for something like the Sausage Party, or a dumbed down, family friendly South Park. And this is not. It is dumbed down. It is family friendly. It seems to make fun, while at the same time embracing, the Super Hero culture. It might work as a filler and the story runs smooth, yet at the end it's still: so what? It looks like it has been done by too many minds and hands and many things do not fit. First you have the mandatory school as a place of killing the fun and the creativity and than you have a few pro teacher union slogans fit in.

If you had to pick a movie that you think is the ultimate kid's movie, would you pick this? I probably would. CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS was a surprise to me. I remember the books being popular in elementary school. I have seen what a CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS book contains. So to see it transported to the big screen would be a challenge. At first, I didn't like that casting of Kevin Hart and Thomas Middletech portraying the two main boys. I would have loved to have heard actual boys play the characters. But as the film went on it didn't bother me as much. I think they did a good job. They play George and Harold, two pranksters that get on the principal's nerves. So from the start we know that these two are real best friends. They also enjoy making comics, with their magnum opus being Captain Underpants. So with the power of a hypno-ring they are able to hypnotize their principal to become Captain Underpants himself. So you can tell that there was going to be a lot of toilet jokes through out. And you know what I liked it. It fits perfectly with the story and at the same time stays true to the source. My favorite part where I completely lost my head laughing would be the Fart concert. What's not to laugh about it. I also liked that the two boys had super imaginations and they showed how they perceived every situation in their heads. It sounds like the movie was about them even though the title is called Captain Underpants. I think this is a great adaptation of the books. Not a lot of studios can pull it off and some how Dreamworks Animation manged to do it.

It is difficult to make a movie that is totally preposterous while not being just plain stupid. This movie succeeds. I do not think there should be a sequel but a tv series based on the books might work.