(deep breath) I think the reason I didn't like the dog man movies as much is because they compressed the story a little too much and it's not particularly their fault because it's not really possible to fit (at the time of production) a 9 book series into one singular shorter digestible movie targeted towards an audience of kids that generally have a shorter attention span, but I still think this particular book series is not something that should be rushed to find an ending because i think something dav pilkey does really well is to work lessons into characters that are easy to understand for kids by introducing the development slowly in a way that makes sense since ultimately the books are canonically written by two fourth graders and we can see this because the first few books are written with the direct and unrealistic but imaginative ideas and evil vs good storyline and the literal naming of objects and fart and poop jokes that I would expect from a younger child's writing but slowly we are introduced to the fact that their world (like ours) is not actually the black and white world it was initially perceived as (you could argue that the progression of understanding the grey morality of the world comes with time and age, just like how the books evolve with time and age; everything is typically simpler as a child and we are introduced to the notion that not everything is literally good or bad as we grow older),
with the best and most obvious example being petey's backstory being slowly revealed and his choice to try and become better despite his upbringing, with how he chose to be someone better than who his father was for lil petey (healing generational trauma), with how he doubts his ability to be good (that we can see in for whom the ball rolls through the undoubtable similarity between petey and his father, his father who is shown to be unable to change his ways; he's scared)
and then his actions are explained, not justified, and he begins taking responsibility over his actions and slowly changing his ways (and we can see that the change doesn't happen overnight because he still falls towards his old "evil" tendencies, but then we also see lil petey bringing him back, and petey actually listens to him (while petey's father does not listen to petey); thus
the reason the lessons in dog man span over multiple books over multiple timelines is because its a reflection of life and how such heavy things don't change over a course of a few days but over a long length of time and really
everything in those books is nothing but simple, these are actual situations that happen in real life, actual things people are suffering from and healing from and learning from and we get to see that in real time within the span of multiple installations of the series but when a movie compresses something like that it essentially ignores the actual meaning behind the story's reason for the slow progression but idk maybe im just tweaking
