DreamWorks is in its glow-up era, and Dog Man is just the latest example

When director Peter Hastings took on Dav Pilkey’s internationally bestselling Dog Man graphic novel series for DreamWorks animation, he knew he couldn’t mess with the books’ loose, rough visual charm. 

“One of the things to recognize is how important the look of the books is to the enjoyment of the books,” Hastings told Polygon. “There’s an innocence to it, and it’s also kind of sophisticated. So our goal was to create something that didn’t change it, but amplified it.”

Like the series of books it’s based on, Hastings’ animated movie Dog Man follows a stitched-together hybrid man-dog who solves crimes. The movie more or less lifts Pilkey’s illustration style from the graphic novels, translating it from hand-drawn 2D art to CG animation. But Hastings’ version isn’t simply a slick 3D graphics makeover. Hastings says that in order to keep the books’ appeal, his team landed on a “high-end handmade” look for the movie, which means a lot of tactile textures that almost makes the characters look like they’re made of craft materials. Still, they retain their minimalistic designs: The humans, for instance, have round ping-pong-ball heads with black dots for eyes. 

“They’re very, very simple, and the facial part of them is very simple,” said Hastings. “So you don’t have all of these millions of muscles to express with the eyes. And so it was really kind of a reverse challenge for the animators to make more out of less.”

Like 2024’s The Wild Robot, 2023’s Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and 2022’s The Bad Guys, Dog Man is a DreamWorks movie that departs not only  from the studio’s once-typical look, but also from the pristine CG aesthetic that defined American animation since 2000. More and more studios are shifting away from those style touchpoints, emboldened by the great leaps that Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse showcased in 2018. 

“[Spider-Verse] is the kind of thing that animators wish they could do,” said Hastings. “It’s like, Oh, it would be so cool to do half-tone, but it’s always like, ‘Can’t do it, too expensive, too hard,’ whatever. And [the Spider-Verse filmmakers] went ahead and did it.”

It’s not so much that DreamWorks animators are chasing the style of Spider-Verse; rather, it’s that Spider-Verse signaled to animators across American studios that they didn’t have to stay in the same photorealistic box. After all, as Hasting told Polygon, photorealistic CG is basically a given these days, with so many live-action movies leaning on animation for special effects. 

“Animation has gotten so good that watching the characters move [isn’t inspiring] so much of a sense of wonder as it was in an old 2D Disney movie,” he said. “One of things I like is that our animation is so basic in terms of the features on their faces that I think it pulls you back into watching the artists’ work, in a way. So not just having the wonder of the story, but having the wonder of the craft be present as well.” 

Dog Man is in theaters now.