Cal Brunker

The dinosaurs in Brunker's 2026 PAW Patrol film offer brief diversion, but the pups have too little to do that is interesting in itself. The intended audience is clear, and familiarity is part of the appeal. We were disappointed by how little comic invention the action contains. The film keeps offering encouragement about perseverance when it needs a better joke or a more particular problem. Rex is treated with care, which makes the careless writing elsewhere harder to excuse.

Brunker began in storyboarding and animation, a useful grounding for directing family films. His first cinema feature, Escape from Planet Earth (2013), was co-written with Bob Barlen, who remains his regular writing partner. He followed it with The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature (2017). He began directing the PAW Patrol films for cinemas in 2021. The 2023 film added superheroes before the 2026 film turned to dinosaurs.

His storyboard experience is apparent in the attention to staging and animation detail. In the dinosaur film, though, visual ambition cannot compensate for the thin script he and Barlen have supplied. There is nothing inherently wrong with a rescue story whose shape a small child can recognise. The pleasure should come from the jokes along the way and from watching the characters work out what to do. Here, the creatures provide intermittent distraction while the writing does too little to make the familiar pattern worth repeating.

The bluntness matters most when Brunker and Barlen move beyond encouragement into lessons about wrongdoing. The dinosaur film treats criminality too readily as a complete explanation of character, and its handling of nature and modern life is muddled. Neither subject requires a lecture, but both deserve the thought given to Rex. We would rather see this partnership spend more time inventing problems for the pups than explaining what children should learn from them. Households already devoted to the pups may be forgiving; we would look elsewhere for a family evening.