Here is the week’s unexpected treat: a really good-natured and unashamedly silly animated comedy for younger children and whatever gigglingly immature grown-ups are lucky enough to accompany them. It’s a bromance between two kids, George (the helium-voiced Kevin Hart) and Harold (Thomas Middleditch) who like to hang out, make each other laugh with reprehensibly crude humour and draw their comic book, which stars Captain Underpants. Their enemies are the joyless school principal Mr Krupp (Ed Helms) and a dictatorial science teacher Mr Poopypants (Nick Kroll), who is unwilling or unable to see the humour in his name.
Mr Krupp puts George and Harold in different classes as a punishment for laughing and after school the two have a funny and surprisingly agonised debate about whether this means the end of their friendship. Can a long-distance relationship ever really work? But through a bizarre twist of fate, Captain Underpants himself is to make an appearance in their lives. It’s a thoroughly entertaining and likable film: two qualities that look easy but are anything but. Captain Underpants deserves a franchise.
