AJ Goes to the Dog Park: Film Review

As a low-budget comedy, AJ Goes to the Dog Park has a surplus of puns and wacky jokes. It cleverly embraces limitations, though its third act is weakly written.

AJ Goes to the Dog Park cleverly avoids this pitfall. It follows AJ (AJ Thompson) as he fights to reclaim his local dog park from a power hungry mayor, and in the process, it over-emphasizes its visual effects inhibitions. Out-of-pocket humor, fourth wall breaks, and puns and gags at every turn contribute to a hilarious indie film.

Director Toby Jones harnesses his experience as a writer on Regular Show and OK K.O.! Let’s Be Heroes to bring AJ to the big screen with a familiar comedic style. In 2006, Jones (who was 19 at the time) collaborated with Danny Davy and Anthony James Thompson on AJ Goes to France. Nearly a decade later, while at Cartoon Network, Jones created AJ’s Infinite Summer with animator Phil Rynda (Steven Universe and The Lego Movie), a short film that proved the potential for the AJ stories to gain a devoted fanbase.

Another decade would separate AJ’s Infinite Summer from AJ Goes to the Dog Park, but the latest project in this niche franchise of sorts does its former entries justice. Fans of 2010s Cartoon Network, YouTube sketch comedy (like the “Malk” video), the “Never let them know your next move” trend on TikTok, and films like Nacho Libre and Shaun of the Dead will find AJ Goes to the Dog Park a side-splitting experience. It’s unabashedly millennial—including references to blogging and various trends of 2000s fashion—but funny and engaging regardless of how many references viewers resonate with.

It also proves that offbeat humor works perfectly within low-budget, indie filmmaking. Using stuffed animals as stunt replacements for dogs and other comically unrealistic props would usually indicate that the filmmakers simply didn’t have the budget to contribute to higher grade effects, but in this film, they are intentional gags which further emphasize the absurdity of the story. Thompson’s performance as AJ is not a masterclass in acting, but he fits the world of Jones’s unpredictability perfectly. In fact, that seems an adequate way to appraise the film overall: acting, visual effects, and screenwriting are not at their technical peak, but they aren’t meant to be. Still, at some points (particularly near the end), the story suffers because of these weaknesses.

AJ Goes to the Dog Park features a beautifully designed miniature set which is criminally underused. It’s the most technically impressive and beautifully crafted aspect of the film, but it isn’t as prominently featured as other set pieces and props. The miniature set is used at opportunistic moments; while its appearance still makes sense within the arc of the movie, its lack of consistent use made it seem as if this wonderful design ended up being squeezed into tight spaces at the last minute. Also squeezed into the third act was the moral of the story, something that previous AJ films featured as a profound moment of character development. Featuring a lesson learned by AJ isn’t my qualm, but this was not well written as the climactic aspect of the film, which resulted in a third act that felt sporadic and incoherent.

As a low-budget comedy, AJ Goes to the Dog Park delivers a surplus of gags, puns, and wacky jokes in the tradition of Cartoon Network and 2000s comedies. While it cleverly embraces its effects limitations, weak writing in the third act makes for a confusing end. Overall, however, this is indie comedy gold.

AJ Goes to the Dog Park will be released in US theatres on July 25, 2025.