- Released: 25 August 1986
- Directed by: Masanori Hata
- Running time: 1 h 16 min
- Rating: 2/5
Synopsis
A pug and a cat befriend one another and end up in all kinds of peril in the wild.
My Thoughts
This Movie Thoughts contains mentions of animal abuse.
Milo and Otis is a western re-cut of the Japanese film The Adventures of Chatran or A Kitten’s Story. I watched the re-cut, so that’s what I’ll mostly be talking about here. There’s quite a bit of behind-the-scenes stuff I’ll address later, but first I just want to talk about the film as it is. Thanks to Anon for suggesting this review.
A pretty basic and cute story concept, and I think it’s executed okay (plot-wise at least). It’s just your basic journey story of two close friends. There isn’t a whole lot of depth to it, and the whole splitting up so soon after their reunion is a bit of a negative, but overall it was a pretty engaging story. The first part of the duo on the farm also felt a bit aimless. There could’ve been quicker ways to establish the two as being friends without the pointless egg-sitting subplot that was resolved in like ten minutes.
The characters aren’t mightily amazing, but they do have their personalities. Milo is the obvious troublemaker who often doesn’t think ahead, and Otis is the smarter and more serious one. The characters aside from them don’t really have anything to them, however. They come across many animals on their journey, some friendly, some not so much. But none of them really have any depth or personality. They’ll have some dialogue, but none of it really noteworthy. But, honestly, I don’t think they need be. The story is about Milo and Otis, and it’s really their journey. The only other characters that have some sort of significance in the story is the mates of the duo, but they don’t have much to them, either.
The cinematography is just very basic. It’s just a whole lot of animal footage shot probably without a complete script in mind and then later tied together into a story. This shows in the pacing and some pointless scenes, but it may also have to do with the whole re-cut part of this movie.
The voice acting is a bit of a downside. Milo and Otis stars only one actor and narrator. He does a good job narrating, but his voices just get really grating after a while. He’s clearly doing his best to come up with as many different voices for all these characters as possible, but it doesn’t really work. I think it would’ve been better to do something along the lines of Homeward Bound here, having different voice actors for each animal, or at least a few for the male and female voices. I also don’t need them to do something like Babe where they add mouths and sometimes expressions to each animal (if they could even do this back then), it’s fine the way it is. Just having more than one person doing all of the voices would’ve been a nice bonus, I guess.
The soundtrack is really all over the place. It often feels goofy and tone-deaf, with it playing silly music over intense situations. I don’t need the best soundtracks ever for my films, but damn, this was very bad. Now to address the obvious elephant in the room that most of you probably already know about: The behind-the-scenes animal abuse. Has it ever been 100% confirmed that it took place. I’m not sure, but, come on, some of this is so obvious on-screen. We have cat in rivers, cat and pug being attacked by bears, cat being attacked by seagulls, cat being thrown of a cliff, et cetera. Some of these shots might have been faked, but there’s no way that some of these were fake. You can literally see it being a live animal in these situations. With a live bear. Or being thrown off a (real) cliff.
An alleged about twenty cats died during the production of this film, and I’m honestly not surprised in the slightest with how they’re being treated. There also may have been kitty paw-breaking involved just to get one of the Milos to limp. Some of the horrible footage of animals being attacked or thrown off cliffs is luckily cut from the western release, but damn. Come on, man. You had this concept for a simple yet cute movie but you think it is worth hurting and even killing so many animals over? Fuck off. It hurt to watch some of these scenes. I know some people nowadays complain about live-action animal movies such as Call of the Wild 2020 or Lady and the Tramp 2019 using too much CGI, but I’d much rather have any fake CGI animal in peril than a real animal.
Milo and Otis is at the surface just a simple cute animal movie you could put on to entertain the kids, but the behind the scenes stuff is just too horrible to make it rank any higher for me. Yes, nothing has ever been totally confirmed, but I know animal abuse on-screen when I see it. It does have some good elements do it, so I won’t give this the lowest ranking for the things I did enjoy, but it won’t go any higher than what I got.
I won’t recommend this to anyone, unless you can stomach it knowing what went down behind the scenes, I guess. I will also say that I have no nostalgia for this movie. First thing I heard about it was in Lindsay Ellis’ video on the subject.
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