Nobody dislikes the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes. This is the premise of the documentary Looking for Mr. Watterson,
and one I can personally attest to — I have never met a single person who
didn’t enjoy the wonderful art, the humor, the philosophy and/or the strip’s creativity. I only know people who haven’t read Calvin & Hobbes yet. This movie is made for that latter group — it’s sincere, but just a little shallow.
The problem is that if you love Calvin & Hobbes enough to watch a documentary on it, then chances
are you’re also interested enough in the strip to already know most of what happened
behind-the-scenes: creator Bill Watterson was and is a recluse, he famously
refused to license the characters despite the strip’s incredible popularity and
the piles of money he stood to make, and he quit the strip in 1995 in large part in
protest over the diminishing size of the comics page in newspapers. That’s all Calvin & Hobbes 201 — the stuff you
learn immediately after you start searching beyond the strip itself. There’s very little here that you can’t get from Watterson’s Wikipedia page. And if you don’t know these tales at this point, I
have to imagine that you’re also not going to spend 90-minutes watching a documentary
on the comic strip, either.
Director Joel Allen Schroeder is in the very small part of the Venn diagram
where he loves Calvin & Hobbes
and yet apparently at no point ventured to learn a single additional thing
about the strip or its creator until he started making this documentary, which
consists of little beyond these very basic revelations.
That’s not to say Dear
Mr. Watterson is wholly without substance; it’s cool to hear from
Watterson’s contemporaries, both cartoonists and syndicate people alike, and it’s also nice to hear from today’s artists about how Calvin & Hobbes influenced
them. Additionally, the film’s design work — the way it “draws” the strips on-screen — is
both tasteful and elegant, but that’s hardly a substitute for substance.
The biggest problem is that Watterson himself is
nowhere to be found. It’s not surprising, of course; the man has turned down
99% of all interviews offered to him even during the height of Calvin & Hobbes’ fame, and refused
100% of the photos people wanted to take of him — why would he change his
mind now just because a fan got it in his head to make a documentary? But his
absence is a gaping hole in the film, a silence that practically drowns
out everyone else who has to speak for him, many times guessing what Watterson was thinking and doing.
As such, Schroeder scrambles to fill up the movie’s
85-minute run time, and it’s obvious. The film’s first 32 minutes contain
little but repetitive fan and professional praise for the strip, as well as a
shockingly lengthy scene where Schroeder goes into the archives of the Chagrin
Falls, Ohio library (where Watterson lived, and used frequently for his art) to read
old Calvin & Hobbes strips on camera) so it’s a long time before the documentary
even gets around to the limited information it has to present. We know already Calvin & Hobbes is pretty great; that’s
the whole reason we’ve bothered to watch this thing in the first place.
In the end, Dear Mr.
Watterson is well-meaning and certainly reverent, but a documentary that
consists of little but people hypothesizing about what Bill Watterson was
thinking and doing isn’t much of a documentary. Dear Mr. Watterson may be a love letter to Calvin & Hobbes and its creator, but until Mr. Watterson
decides to write back, it doesn’t have much to talk about.
