Movie Thoughts: The Secret Life of Pets (2016)

• Released: June 16, 2016
  
• Directed by: Chris Renaud
• Running time: 1 h 27 min
• Rating 2/5

Synopsis

Jack Russell Max lives with his loving owner in New York, where she is his entire world. Things change, however, when his person brings in a new dog called Duke for him to share the household with. The two instantly dislike one another, and try to get rid of each other. This ends up getting them both lost in the city, and in the end they’ll have to work together in order to get back home and escape the dogcatchers, a clowder of rogue cats and a band of abandoned pets.

My Thoughts

A very basic story. I’m going to be honest, I saw everyone call this “Toy Story with pets” when it first came out and I hoped this wouldn’t be the case, but it really does feel like that. Just replace toys with pets, Woody with Max and Duke with Buzz. They don’t follow the exact same plot beats, but they’re way too close to not notice the obvious inspiration Pets took from Pixar’s first film.

The characters are just very basic. Max starts out as a selfish jerk but gradually grows to appreciate Duke. Duke was a bit more interesting, as he has a backstory, but even he felt just kind of bland. That’s it for our leads, but the side characters don’t do much better. Gidget is simply the strong-willed hopeless romantic who... honestly wasn’t necessary in this movie. I get that they wanted to give it a B-plot, but it really took the focus away from Max and Duke’s main plot sometimes. There’s a whole bunch of sidekicks in here, but none of them are really too interesting. Also, Max and Duke’s owner? She’s literally a plot point and has no actual personality. We get told by Max that she’s this great caring owner, but very little is shown of her. She appears for only a few minutes in the entire thing, which is just a very bad case of the “show don’t tell”-rule being broken.

The animation is standard for Illumination. Good-looking, but still somewhat cheap as you can see the same models be recycled time and again. 

The character designs themselves are... I don’t know, not very good. The human designs of Illumination are okay, at least if you ask me, but some of the animals in this just look really off. Max and Gidget look like their respective breeds all right, but then there’s dogs like Duke and Mel that have somewhat human-like features on their faces, with them being somewhat flat and their mouths and teeth being very human-like, which just doesn’t make them look like dogs at all, just weird four-legged vaguely-human like creatures. All of the dogs have human like teeth, by the way, which is a nono and just looks kind of uncanny valley. It simply doesn’t work. Some of the cats also look like actual cats, and then there’s others that are just a vague blob with some cat-like features. I’m just really not a fan of the character designs and how they’re doing anatomy-wise. The character designers should stick a little closer to the real animal and less to this vaguely cartoon-y humanesque hybrid they’ve got going on.

The backgrounds and environments were fine, though they really don’t speak to me personally. I’ve never been a fan of busy city environments, with them making me anxious, so seeing it represented here doesn’t exactly do anything for me.

The music was generic but okay. They, for whatever reason, felt the need to shove in Happy by Pharell Williams again, even if it’s just for a second. They also did this in Despicable Me 2, but unlike over here, the song had more of an actual function there.

Finally, the humor was kind of hit and miss. The only joke I laughed at in this entire thing was spoiled in the trailer (that being the heavy metal poodle), so needless to say the rest doesn’t fare very well. It’s just very basic pet humor, some fat jokes regarding Chloe (who also has human teeth, by the way. Brrr) minor potty humor, the basic stuff for an Illumination film.

Is The Secret Life of Pets worth the watch? I’d say, honestly, no, not really. Not when we have the same story executed miles and miles better by Pixar from years ago. But if you insist on watching a basic cutesy pet movie, I guess it wouldn’t do any harm to put this on or anything. It’s just very, very basic. This surprises nobody, but Toy Story did it better.