A Toy Story for pets. There, I’ve gotten it out of the way – the classic Disney film that every critic will mention in reviewing Yarrow Cheney’s and Chris Renaud’s The Secret Life of Pets. Perhaps cracking early the plot resemblance spoiled my high hopes for this film. We have two rival dogs vying for pet owner Katie’s attention, a Jack Russell terrier Max (Louis C.K.) and a huge shaggy mongrel Duke (Eric Stonestreet) – the Andy, Woody and Buzz Lightyear in this version. The clash of these two mismatched dogs leads them at the mercy of ‘The Flushed Pets’, a gang of sewer-dwelling, human-hating animals led by a fluffy sociopathic bunny Snowball (Kevin Hart) – yet again similar to Toy Story 3’s group of road-abandoned toys led by Lotso bear. Max’s disappearance sets his cutesy neighbor toys, I mean, pets to go for an adventure all over New York City in the hopes of finding him. The Secret Life of Pets just aims to be a fun, harmless, kiddie movie and it easily achieves that goal. Standing next to Toy Story, however, this appears to be the less remarkable model.
The first trailer of this film went viral before and it promised something different: the simple proclivities in the life of domesticated animals – an obese tabby cat raids the remaining contents of a fridge, a dachshund uses an electric mixer to give himself a back massage, a seemingly innocent poodle head-bangs to System of a Down, and so on. These scenes may be smaller in scope but it generates more excitement. To my surprise, the teaser trailer is actually what transpires in the first ten minutes. When the film starts to send the pets to the metropolis, only to follow a highly-derivative storyline, I would rather have them stay inside the house and continue their silly lifestyles.
Sure enough, the plot rip-off from multiple films (aside from Toy Story, I also got vibes of Stuart Little 2, Babe: Pig in the City and even Fight Club at some point) results to a disjointed film. The friendship between Max and Duke is hastily built around a dream sequence of dancing wieners or what could have been an unintended and subtle promotion to the upcoming Sausage Party. The half-hearted attempt for Duke’s character development goes nowhere in favor of a crazy car chase. (I’m getting tired of animals knowing how to drive cars at their first try. It only works in the Looney Tunes universe.)
On the plus side, the film does a great job on anthropomorphizing animals from an animation standpoint – Illumination Entertainment paints these ‘awww’-inducing cuddly animals in their own style. My only gripe is Max has too skinny legs to support his top-heavy body. Vocal performances are solid too, with Jenny Slate and Kevin Hart as the stand outs.
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The Secret Life of Pets remains to have a high-appeal for children and avid pet-lovers, but it’s lacking the big underlying social allegory that only adults can get. The viewing experience is tantamount to watching cat videos – it’s a healthy dose of distraction but it also leaves no recollection of substantive material. Sadly, this is not the secret life that I was expecting of.
MOWER MINIONS
[dropcap size=big]T[/dropcap]here’s a point in my life when I really adored the Minions but to see them now reprising in this peppy yet uninspired pre-feature short film is a foreboding concern that they might be the next Blue Sky Studio’s Scrat of Ice Age. In the span of four minutes, we see minions getting incinerated, breathing on poop bags, forcefully staring at garden gnomes and other desperate attempts to tickle the audience’s funny bone… all because they want a blender. Where Pixar gets creative and hits your soft-spot, Illumination shoves bare butts of gibberish yellow creatures into your face. This painfully unfunny short can be blamed for setting the tone of disappointment I had for The Secret Life of Pets.
