Phineas and Ferb the Movie: Across the 2nd Dimension (2011)

The 2011 television film Phineas and Ferb the Movie: Across the 2nd Dimension sends its two stepbrothers through a portal into a parallel Tri-State Area ruled by an evil version of their nemesis, a dictator with an army of robots and a grudge involving a lost toy train. It is a musical, an action picture, and a story about a boy learning that his pet platypus has been a government agent the whole time. The premise is sturdy, the songs are hummable, and the whole affair moves with the brisk confidence of a series that knew exactly what it was.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is a product of its moment and little more. The cast is diverse in the casual manner of a long-running cartoon: a South Asian boy, a large and loud friend, a squad of girls who build things. None of them are there to make a point. Race is not a subject. Neither is sexuality, the body, the climate, or the workings of capital. The alternate-dimension Candace leads a resistance, and Isabella gets a moment of her own initiative, but these are adventure-plot mechanics, the standard furniture of a cartoon climax.

The film's moral instruction is gentle and sung, not preached. It concerns friendship, honesty, and the bond between a boy and his animal, and it resolves through a memory-erasing device that lets everyone keep what they love. There is no lecture here, no sermon, just a warm message about growing up and letting go, delivered with a joke and a guitar solo from Slash. We are left with a competent, good-natured piece of children's entertainment that asks nothing of its audience but attention. In the ledger of cultural awareness, it registers as a rounding error.