If you’ve been down enough medium-depth rabbit holes on the internet, you are likely to encounter the innuendo cartoon clip. Ren and Stimpy suggestively sawing wood, SpongeBob watching a gyrating anemone: It turns out, many of our favorite children’s cartoons could be dotted with moments of perversion.
There’s a particular appeal to this kind of discovery. Adult animation has been booming for some time now, but finding dirty jokes nestled within the medium of children’s cartoons scratches a particular itch. That comedic tension is meant to fuel the conceit of the animated raunch-fest that is “Fixed.”
Directed by Genndy Tartakovsky, an animation veteran behind a handful of Cartoon Network shows and the “Hotel Transylvania” franchise, the movie revives the 2-D animation style and vibrant colors of a 1990s cartoon, but plucks out any Easter egg innuendos for a full-on sex comedy.
In a neighborhood full of neutered dogs, Bull (Adam Devine) is a 2-year-old pooch whose stones are happily intact. He takes pride in his surviving manhood, even if it’s not enough for him to compete with the purebred crowd that includes his neighbor and dream dog, Honey (Kathryn Hahn). But when he learns that his owners are planning to neuter him, Bull spirals and goes off leash, running away from home and into the big city.
Think, in other words, of an X-rated version of “The Secret Life of Pets.” There is a juvenile pleasure to the idea, like the kind of glee you might get from spotting a dirty Mickey Mouse cartoon out in the wild. Tartakovsky has nicely captured the warm nostalgia of a bygone generation of cartoons in the movie’s animation, and seeing it sullied with this kind of lewd mischief is briefly fun.
But mostly the movie insists on sticking to a mandate of raunchiness. You get the sense that it’s the work of an animator who, hampered for years by the constraints of children’s entertainment, just wants to get wild after being given a green light.
There are occasionally funny gags and a relatively robust ensemble of comedic voices (Idris Elba as a canine who’s traumatized by the ghost of his mother’s teats is the uniquely stupid bit that manages to land). But the film can’t quite fill in much beyond its initial wacky conceit, lacking the extra narrative and comedic pieces to match, for better or worse, a counterpart like “Sausage Party,” Seth Rogen’s own bawdy animation entry.
Those old winking cartoon clips that resurface online make the rounds and make us laugh in shock. But that’s only because they were rare moments that we knew weren’t supposed to be there. “Fixed,” though, can’t help but go feral.
Fixed
Rated R for strong crude sexual content and language throughout, some drug use and violence. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. Watch on Netflix.