Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds, review: a cringe-inducing CGI ‘update’
Dirs: Toni Garcia, Stephen Hughes. Starring: Tomás Ayuso, Stephen Hughes, Julio Perillán, Robbie K Jones, Blair Holmes, Jeff Espinoza, Elisabeth Gray, Karina Matas Piper, Scott Cleverdon (voices). U cert, 84 mins
One for all and all for one, old cartoons are often crummy.
One for all and all for one, even from the Eighties.
One for all and all for one – it’s a well-known story.
Things you used to think were fun, have aged terr-i-bly.
One for all and all for one: Dogtanian’s a good example.
One for all and all for one, Dumas for the kiddies.
Viewers’ psyches overrun with that effing theme tune,
Once it’s in your cerebrum, time to quarantine.
Da-da-lum, da-da-lum – that’s quite enough of that. And if you fall into the age bracket for whom Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds was a staple of after-school viewing, I can only apologise for reminding you of its opening song, composed by Guido and Maurizio de Angelis, which boasts a level of infectiousness the Delta variant can only dream of. Naturally, the ditty pops up in various forms throughout this perfunctory CGI remake of the show – including a singalong version in the final scene, with lyrics provided.
Almost four decades on, Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds remains an inherently bizarre proposition: a loose, child-friendly retelling of Alexandre Dumas’s swashbuckling tale of courtly intrigue in 17th-century France, but with dogs. Like the series, the film was produced by the Spanish studio BRB Internacional, and is every bit as rickety, with charmless computer graphics replacing the jolting hand-drawn animation of old (which was produced by the Japanese studio Nippon Animation, who also worked with BRB on another unexpected literary adaptation, Around the World with Willy Fog).
In fairness, the familiar figures of Dogtanian (voiced by Tomás Ayuso), his mouse squire Pip (Robbie K Jones), the honourable muskehounds, the dastardly Cardinal Richelieu and so on have all been translated into three dimensions faithfully enough. But they clunk around the place with a crude, video-game-like woodenness that feels at least 15 years off the pace.
It’s not unwelcome that the film seizes almost every opportunity it can to temporarily slide back into two dimensions – often for flashbacks, but also in a dream in which Dogtanian floats up to the clouds with his beloved Juliette (Karina Matas Piper), which was of course immortalised in the opening credits of the original cartoon. Other arguably beloved sequences – including the one in which Dogtanian turns an airborne apple into wafter-thin slices with his sword – have been dutifully squeezed into the busy plot, which condenses the show’s first 18 episodes into a sub-90-minute adventure.
But the hurry to cover so much ground makes the pacing a nightmare: every scene unfolds as if to a merciless deadline, as characters gabble their way through expository dialogue and reel off semi-jokes that hammer away at their sole identifiable character traits. (Athos is always hungry, Aramis is fey, Pip is acutely annoying.)
A horse passes wind. Some minor villains’ trousers fall down. In the era of Pixar – even in the era of Minions – this is all cringe-inducingly retrograde, and only so much of it can be excused on the grounds of faithfulness to cringe-inducing source material. Less a case of “one for all” than “one for emergencies only”.
In cinemas from Friday
