Film Exposure

AJ lives a perfect life of infinite routine: same butter toast every morning, same way to work on his bicycle, same easy job, same dinner with friends or father, and same bedtime ritual with his dogs. Every day, forever… or so he wishes. One day, when the mayor decides to do away with his favourite dog park, AJ’s life starts to crumble, eventually sending him into an epic quest for restoring normality – a quest filled with flashbacks, training montages, cartoon logic mise-en-scène, and approximately 5 gags a minute for 80 minutes.

Director Toby Jones comes from animation, having for instance worked on the shows OK! OK! Let’s Be Heroes and Regular Show. Accustomed to shorter formats and the frantic pace of animated TV comedies, he set out to take his craft to the next level by applying the same approach to the (mostly) live-action feature film. The result? AJ Goes to the Dog Park, an endlessly imaginative indie comedy that absolutely never stops. The early sitcom aesthetic quickly becomes a playground for the filmmaker’s vivid narrative imagination; whether or not you find it hilarious will, I suppose, depend on your sense of humour, but Jones and his friends are nothing if not generous: every single scene relies on visual ideas that make the film one of the most dynamic and formally unpredictable of recent memory.

Much like Hundreds of Beavers, the film finds a lot of its laughs in the breaks in continuity and the playful way it toys with the audience’s narrative expectations. In any other film, the hero’s quest to learn how to fight would result in a pedestrian music video-like training montage; instead, Jones decapitates his protagonist (the actor suddenly replaced by a dummy), lets the trainer use his head for a slam dunk, which then falls back on the open neck. The next shot, AJ is back to his old self again, fully aware of what just happened, but physically unharmed.

This Looney Tunes logic is at the heart of the project and allows for a sustained pace that will have those who are on the same wavelength laughing their butts off, revelling in the cinematic representation of abstract concepts or idiomatic expressions taken literally: imagine the hero eating his remote control out of frustration, kicking down a man-shaped hole in a door, or drinking stewp (stew+soup) out of a parcel. Most of the gags are visual and therefore pretty universally enjoyable, while some dialogues are hit or miss. Sometimes, Jones indulges in the odd meta joke (“Because you’re the main character”), which I think weakens the film by injecting an unwelcome degree of cynicism (or at least self-consciousness incompatible with genuine emotional involvement). Thankfully, those occurrences are rare, and the film takes its personal stakes mostly seriously in spite of the absurdist tone.

The narrative progression is not as video game-like as in the aforementioned beaver film, but Jones does manage to offer a good few set-ups and pay-offs, with early gags becoming unexpectedly important in the film’s third act: see, for instance, a seemingly innocuous situation occurring 17 minutes into the film and becoming a clever narrative turning point 37 minutes later. Because this kind of comedies continuously stimulate the intellect of the viewer through their formal approach (i.e., disbelief is not suspended but repeatedly obliterated), the narrative must present an emotional truth that can bring it all together and turn the jokes into building blocks to something worthwhile. AJ Goes to the Dog Park achieves just that – taking us through a perilous adventure triggered by a series of mundane situations and descriptions, culminating in an ambitious showcase of DIY entertainment cinema (fans of Wakaliwood, like me, will be delighted) in service of a heartfelt take on the changing nature of life and the value of relationships.

The film very much feels like a feature debut, for better (the desire to give everything) and for worse (…the desire to give… everything). While never boring (how could it be?), the film at times feels breathless, overstuffed, afraid of slowing down to maybe push a formal or visual idea to its logical or artistic limits, instead choosing to pile up new ideas on top of others restlessly. Not necessarily a bad thing, but perhaps an avenue of growth to explore in future endeavours. By combining Adult Swim humour and formal creativity, Toby Jones and his friends (some of whom directed certain segments of the film) prove once again that indie filmmaking is fertile ground for the imagination, and that inventiveness is sometimes inversely proportional to financial means. Made on a micro budget and mostly amongst friends and local Fargo residents, AJ Goes to the Dog Park celebrates its locale, its people, and the limitless possibilities of cinema.

AJ Goes to the Dog Park is part of the Fantastic Fest 2024 program. Thanks to Justin Cook for making this review possible.

AJ Goes to the Dog Park – No European release date yet
Directed by Toby Jones
With AJ Thompson, Greg Carlson, Crystal Cossette Knight