Genndy Tartakovsky has earned the one for him. As creator of some of the most seminal animated television of the late ‘90s and early 2000s, his place in animation history is set in solid stone. This is the guy who brought anime into the American cultural consciousness, made Star Wars cool when it was suffering a PR crisis amidst the release of the prequel trilogy, and (with a tip of the hat toward Space Ghost Coast to Coast) built the foundation upon which Cartoon Network stands. A joke-filled, traditionally animated movie about a domesticated animal featuring adult themes? After the inordinate financial success of the Hotel Transylvania series, why not? Ralph Bakshi got away with it. Fritz the Cat remains one of the boldest, most provocative American films — animated or otherwise — ever produced. And the premise here certainly sounds like it could have come from Bakshi: Bull, an anxious yet amiable mutt, finds out his beloved testicles are going the way of the dodo. Convinced his manhood is the only thing that makes him worthy of affection — especially from his unrequited love, an Afghan Hound named Honey — he runs away from his home in the suburbs to live a hardscrabble life in the city.
Alas, FIXED is more Barbera than Bakshi, aping the good-natured slapstick of the former and foregoing the ruthless bite of the latter. While not altogether bereft of a Bakshi influence, Tartakovsky has too mainstream a sensibility for FIXED to provoke. It’s clumsily pitched at the intersection of adult and adolescent, and seemingly made by the boy who heard about sex from the neighborhood weird kid but doesn’t actually know what sex is yet. Like another recent confused animated film, Piece by Piece, FIXED doesn’t really know who it’s for: is it the pubescent boy stumbling upon it while browsing on his mother’s Netflix account after she’s gone to sleep, or the 30-year-old for whom Ed, Edd n Eddy remains the state of the art? Piece by Piece suffered because it was a wolfish documentary disguised in the sheep’s clothing of a LEGO movie. FIXED suffers because it’s a sheep in, well, an emasculated and sex-obsessed dog’s clothing.
To its credit, FIXED is a real movie, not the Frankensteined hatchet job stitching together discrete skits it so easily could have been. At 86 minutes — six of which are devoted to credits — the film is sufficiently breezy and diverting, and the script has clearly been workshopped within an inch of its life. Every incident carefully segues into the next, and occasionally these transitions offer platforms for playful animation. Bull accidentally inhales weed smoke and hallucinates his balls popping right out from under him; Bull looks on at a Shih Tzu dominatrix as he enters a dog brothel — The Humphouse, if you’re curious whether Tartakovsky is interested in subtlety here — barking at her subordinates to roll over and play dead; Bull and friends chase a squirrel and totally mangle it, blood gushing out of the hole where its head used to be Happy Tree Friends style — the kinds of things you can only get away with in this medium. Just as often, however, scenes lack the jazzy snap they ought to have. The dogs get to do plenty of gyrating, but sit-and-stay jokes about balls or sex or a dog’s role in the dog hierarchy supplant the animator’s prerogative to do something with the form. If nothing else, the voice cast at least sounds like they’re having fun reading the lines.
The confused tug-of-war between squeaky clean sitcom-style storytelling and over-the-top sexual content never fully resolves in FIXED, which wouldn’t be such a problem if the movie didn’t bark a call to be different under the pressures of conformity as its major message. The closest it gets to settling its Portnoy’s Complaint meets The Secret Life of Pets tension is during the climax, when a heartfelt moment arises because of the movie’s naughtiness, not in spite of it. Otherwise, FIXED reads like a flaccid homage to cartoons that work better when they use innuendo to get their points across. At least Tartakovsky’s got a great excuse: you can always blame the dog.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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