PAW Patrol: Mighty Pups (2018)

Adventure Bay has a meteor problem. Mayor Humdinger and his nephew Harold, scheming as ever, knock a golden space rock off course, and the resulting energy infusion turns a squad of municipal service dogs into flying, glowing, weather-controlling superheroes. The plot proceeds with the ruthless efficiency of a toy commercial that has learned to tell jokes. There is a villain, a rescue, and a lesson about teamwork delivered at a volume suitable for the very young. Charles E. Bastien directs with the flat competence of someone who knows exactly which aisle of the store this will be shelved in.

The film declines to lecture. This is a rare children's property, one that resists the urge to smuggle a curriculum into the adventure. The pups are dogs. They have jobs. One of them is pink and enjoys spa treatments, and nobody stages an intervention about it. Race goes unmentioned because the characters are canines voiced by children. Class goes unmentioned because the antagonist is a cat-owning mayor with a vanity problem, not a symbol of late-stage capitalism. The environment is not a character. Nobody is diagnosed, redeemed, or made an example of.

There is a temptation, in this line of work, to find meaning in everything. A golden meteor could be read as a metaphor for resource extraction. The pups' powers could be read as an allegory for collective action. None of it holds. The film is a brisk, harmless, aggressively merchandised adventure about dogs who can fly, and it wants nothing more from us than a subscription. We classify it accordingly. Some vintages are simply grape juice, and there is no shame in that.