The Secret Life of Pets

Dir: Chris Renaud, Yarrow Cheney

2016

****

2016 was a good year for animated film, Zootropolis was definitely my favourite but The Secret Life of Pets wasn't that far behind. It took a while to work out where the film was going though, what kind of animation it wanted to be and what sort of story it wanted to tell. I'm not a huge fan of animated animals being too human-like. I'm fine with animals talking (as long as the voice suits the creature) but when they start driving cars, defying gravity and generally stop acting like their species I have a problem. However, in The Secret Life of Pets a rabbit drives a bus, a dog defies gravity and animals do a lot of things animals just don't do but they do stop just short of going too far. It fits my personal feeling that animated animals should always fit somewhere between Pluto and Goofy if you catch my drift? As for the story, it could have gone two different ways, either keep the story in the confines of the pet's building or go out into the big city, I'm glad they went with the latter and I'm glad this was a big adventure but it is impossible to overlook the fact that this is basically the plot of Toy Story but with domesticated animals. The two main characters are pretty much Woody and Buzz Lightyear and their buddies are all very similar to those seen in the Toy Story trilogy. The humour is very similar but also incorporates an element of Tom & Jerry and a bit of The Simpsons. The episode when Homer day dreamed about a land of chocolate was the first thing that sprung to mind when lead dogs Max and Duke raided a sausage factory and begun fantasizing about a sausage world. Another scene sees a character get covered in dust, then rubble, then more rubble, then a whole brick wall and then to add surreal and unrealistic insult to injury, the wall then bursts into flames. This is straight out of The Simpsons and it makes no apologies for it. There is a bunny attack scene right out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and even a scene out of Jurassic Park: The Lost World (the bit with the truck hanging over the cliff). Very little of the film is original and for what might be the first time ever, it didn't bother me one little bit. It worked, they pulled it off and for all the many ideas they 'borrowed' it paid off, they got away with it, but to be fair, there is plenty of its own charm too. The scene where the dog eat their fill in the sausage factory is glorious, an improvement you could say on the scene of its inspiration, it may anger the Simpsons hard-core but not me. The animal characteristics are also spot on, and there are many original characters the film can call its own and pretty much every joke, either vocal or physical, lands directly on target. The voices aren't quite all big name stars either, which is a good thing, as they are all perfectly suited. Louis C.K. and Eric Stonestreet actually sound like I'd imagine dogs would sound like if they spoke. Kevin Hart's Snowball, the ex-magician's rabbit turned revolutionary is brilliant and, as much as I hated her Obvious Child, Jenny Slate is adorable as Gidget, the puffy Pomeranian. The rest of the cast is strong, Lake Bell being an unexpected delight as the overweight and accident-prone tabby cat Chloe and Albert Brooks stealing each scene as Tiberius, a curmudgeonly red-tailed hawk. The action and adventure elements would be considered overdone in most animations but it never feels that way here, mainly thanks to the consistent humour and the spot on physical comedy. It has heaps of charm, much like Zootropolis, and it is miles ahead of tired animations such as Madagascar and the Ice Age movies. It was the 6th most profitably film of 2016 at it was well deserving, I just hope they come up with something a little more original for the sequel.