On Ward's series, the draughtsmanship was simple, and the characters were so barely-animated that they seemed to slide across the screen, like figures in a pop-up book. This movie, in contrast, goes for the glitzy, the state-of-the-art. The designs are highly stylized, but with incongruous elements. The realistic shadings and blockbuster action-film-style (virtual) camerawork seem at odds with the movie's Eisenhower-Kennedy era cars, clothes, hairstyles and architecture; ditto the characters with their Ward-style bobble-heads and sticklike bodies and arms.
When Danny Elfman's sprightly-bombastic score swells and Mr. Peabody and Sherman zoom through snaky time-space wormholes a la "Star Trek" or "Contact," or race out of a collapsing tomb, or body surf through a network of sewer tunnels just ahead of raging flood waters or flame-clouds, it's as if rather slight source material had been injected with a hyper-dose of steroids that made it balloon grotesquely, creating bulges where bulges shouldn't be.
