The bumper Peppa Pig omnibus currently in cinemas might win over new big-screen converts – if you can get them to sit still through 25 minutes of Volkswagen adverts first

Until this morning, I had never seen a single episode of Peppa Pig. Sure, it’s on in my house all the time because I have a two-year-old, but that doesn’t mean I’ve actually seen any of it. When I’m lying on the sofa with my son and Peppa Pig is on, I’m usually looking at my phone or thinking about food or just rolling my eyes back into the top of my head and waiting for the merciful hand of death to gently escort me away from this miserable joke of a life.

But that has changed, because Peppa Pig: My First Cinema Experience was released today, and I have gone and seen it. With my kid. In a cinema. This meant that the place I have come to view as an exclusively childless treat would be invaded by a tiny, yelling interloper who – although I love him more than anything – was guaranteed to demonstrate a brazen disregard for traditional cinema etiquette. At midday. During the school holidays. As the kids say, FML.

For any newcomers, Peppa Pig is a five-minute cartoon series about a happy little pig, her happy mum, her oversensitive snowflake of a little brother and her dad, who is the living embodiment of every disparaging paternal stereotype rolled into one. Nothing much happens in any given episode, but it’s fun and colourful and lively, and children seem to go nuts for it.

Peppa Pig: My First Cinema Experience, meanwhile, is nine of these episodes slammed together, intercut with some live-action footage. As a work of art, it is terrible. But as an actual first cinema experience, broken up into chunks and over before you know it, you can see why it exists. It’s a gateway drug, essentially. If your toddler can sit through Peppa Pig: My First Cinema Experience today, the theory goes, they’ll be ready for The Tin Drum tomorrow.

We’ll start with the good news. There is no mucking around with the formula here. None of the episodes fall into the usual TV-to-film problem of being too removed from the original. The closest we get is the opening segment, where Peppa Pig and her friends go to London and meet the Queen, and the Queen nearly murders everyone by trying to jump Tower Bridge in a bus. But even that feels like a regular episode of Peppa Pig. Plus, from my perspective as a parent praying that his child wouldn’t go bananas halfway through the film, it did its job. My kid, surly and fractious before the screening, was rapt from the word go.

Now the less good news. The cinema I went to took the My First Cinema Experience subtitle a little too literally, in that the main presentation came front-loaded with all the adverts and trailers you’d get for a full-length film. On one hand, you will never know true stress until you’re tasked with keeping a child seated and happy during a 25-minute onslaught of Volkswagen commercials. On the other hand, at least all the children know what a mind-numbing piss-take it is to arrive at a cinema at the stated time. This is an important lesson that will serve them well in life.

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Similarly unsuccessful are the live-action segments, where a freakishly infantilised woman larks around with the Peppa Pig puppets from the touring Peppa Pig live shows. In fact, the term “puppets” seems like a kindness. If you’re not expecting them, they are a genuine shock. They don’t even look like Peppa Pig. They look like the sort of thing a detective would find locked in a serial killer’s fridge two weeks after an arrest. They are, in a word, weird.

Most damningly of all, Peppa Pig: My First Cinema Experience is 10 minutes too long. Now, make a real film too long, and the worst you’ll create is minor fidgeting. When there’s an entire auditorium full of toddlers, though, you risk losing control completely. When the collective attention span had been hit at my screening, 50 minutes in, all the kids simultaneously started trying to wriggle free from their parents. The volume rose. Parental sighing became audible. Then one baby started crying, which started another baby crying, which set two more off, and then the whole thing dominoed until the place came to resemble a South American national day of mourning. Ten minutes shorter and none of this would have happened.

But forget objective reviewing for a moment. I can still remember the first time I went to the cinema with my dad, and it’s a memory I’ll always cherish. If my son can look back on today half as fondly as I did, then Peppa Pig: My First Cinema Experience will become an important moment in all our lives. If he doesn’t, though, I’ve wasted my bloody time.