Teacher’s Pet

In the big-screen version of the popular Disney TV series, the title character (voice by Nathan Lane) is a talking blue dog who, Pinocchio-like, dreams of becoming “a real boy.” When his schoolteacher owner and her son go to Florida on vacation, he tags along to find a mad scientist who’ll change him into a human. The wacky premise is matched by the design of the film—it looks like the doodles that kids scribble in their school notebooks when they’re bored. It will probably look better on video (the colors are garish and eye-numbing, and the black outlines look 3 feet thick), but the Rocky-and-Bullwinkle brand of grown-up humor is hard to resist. What the film lacks in graphic sophistication it makes up for in visual imagination, especially in several exuberant musical numbers.