There’s nothing ‘wimpy’ about new “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” moving on Disney+

I was one of the kids who connected deeply to Jeff Kinney’s “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” books when I was in early grade school. Perhaps it was the main character Greg Heffley’s antics as an unintentional goofball or the comical hand-drawn illustrations that were fun to flip through, but I was only one of a few million kids who loved reading Kinney’s books.

And while live-action movies were made from those books, it wasn’t until Kinney got the opportunity to create ‘comic’ animated versions of his commical visual novel that he found a new dimension to his stories.

“I really love doing these Disney+ [animated] movies,” he said to us in a recent interview. “There’s something about the process of making these that are so fun; the same fun that I had when writing the books.”

In the newest installment of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid animated movies aptly named “The Last Straw,” Kinney ‘drew’ on the deeper relationship between his own characters that seem to always have it with each other: Greg and his dad, Frank.

Like his book that was released of the same name back in 2009, the story really hammers in to Frank and his own analysis of how he fathers his clumsy son. When asked if Kinney wrote Frank’s character as a projection of his own father, Kinney laughingly refuted.

“I actually wrote this script when I began to see my own kids grow up like me,” he said. “It all really became unlocked when I started to diagnose my own fathering of my very funny boys.”

Kinney went on to agree that while there is a deeper emotional core to the story in this film, he did want to balance it all out with the humor that also marks his books. “It’s actually a lot easier to do funny gags for these stories because it’s all animated,” Kinney said. “This one isn’t short of laughs at and with Greg.”

It really all begins and ends, though, with Greg Heffley. At least in Kinney’s mind.

“Yes, I have said that Greg is an exaggerated and comical version of me as a kid, and while he isn’t perfect, I still love that kid.” He added, “I think maybe that’s the secret to why these stories have worked over all these years.”

Our special thanks to Jeff Kinney for contributing to this story!

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