The humor is smart and silly, qualities more closely linked than adult society likes to give out. Like the books, which regularly issue warnings to the viewers of something potentially distasteful ahead - perhaps a kind of trolling of the series’ critics - the cartoon keeps calling attention to the terms of its own construction, with lines like “We can’t actually show the collision because that’s not nice, but we can show you this big cloud of smoke and stuff drawn in an elaborate anime style - so cool,” and references to “the red tablecloth cleverly established earlier in the scene.” Nothing serves children better on the road to maturity - I say this as a one-time child fairly happy with how he turned out - than letting them know that the world is as absurd as they suspect it is, and that much of what has been constructed upon it is arbitrary and even stupid. (Backgrounds are not something Pilkey typically bothers with.) As in the books, every episode is divided into chapters and contains a “comic-book” portion, rendered in childlike scrawl and narrated manically - maniacally? - by Hastings himself. Overseen by Peter Hastings (“Animaniacs,” “Pinky and the Brain,” “Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness”), the show plays off some of the visual world-building of the movie, but is presented in a 2-D style more appropriate to Pilkey’s jaunty drawings, and more than usually reminiscent of classic cel animation, with bold outlines and bright, angular, askew backgrounds.
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