PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie

Small Paws, Big Weather

I keep thinking about how PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie treats power as something both gleeful and a little ridiculous. That sounds obvious for a children’s movie about talking rescue dogs, but Cal Brunker’s sequel understands the joke and the feeling at the same time. A meteor hits Adventure City, the pups get upgraded into super-powered versions of themselves, and the movie immediately starts asking a question it never states out loud: what happens when a franchise built on teamwork suddenly hands each character a personal lightning bolt?

That’s the real trick here. This isn’t just a bigger version of the 2021 PAW Patrol feature; it’s a neat little remix of the brand’s own logic, turning the team’s competence into spectacle without losing the toy-box clarity that makes the whole thing legible to very small children. Brunker has been shepherding this world for a while now, and he seems to know exactly how far he can push it before the thing stops being gentle, modular, and reassuring.

The answer, apparently, is pretty far — but not too far. The movie is a sequel, yes, but also a kind of brightness test: how much chaos can you pour into Adventure City before it stops feeling like a place a kid can mentally inhabit?

What I like about the film’s design is that it doesn’t drown the audience in detail. The colors are loud but readable, the action is staged with an almost old-fashioned concern for silhouette, and the pups’ powers are expressed in ways even a distracted preschooler can parse in half a second. Animation like this lives or dies on clarity.

You can’t admire it with the same vocabulary you’d use for a Ghibli forest or a Pixar eyelash; you have to ask whether the movie lets the eye keep up with the feeling. Mostly, it does. The meteor may be the plot engine, but the movie’s real engine is rhythm: quick, forgiving, and designed to reset before any one joke, chase, or emotional beat overstays its welcome.

There’s a scene early on — or at least, one of the scenes that children will probably remember best — in which the pups first discover their powers and immediately start testing them with a mixture of delight and confusion. That’s where the movie becomes most itself. The giddy flailing matters more than the polished outcome.

One pup zips, another glows, another overcommits to the new sensation like a toddler realizing a voice can echo in a bathroom. Brunker stages the moment with a light touch: the camera stays close enough to catch the body language, but never so close that it turns fussy. The whole sequence has that rare children’s-film quality of pretending discovery is an athletic event.