The Secret Life of Pets

Ever since it was intro­duced in 1935, many great minds have spent count­less hours delib­er­at­ing the para­dox of Schrödinger’s cat, but no one ever stopped to ask what the cat might be get­ting up to inside its hypo­thet­i­cal box. Maybe the pos­si­bil­i­ties are just too vast for the human brain to con­tem­plate, or maybe it’s because the truth about how pets behave when left to their own devices is that there isn’t any­thing secret about it.

As much as we like to imag­ine all sorts of wacky shenani­gans going down the sec­ond we leave, we know that in real­i­ty it’s a case of eat, sleep, pine, repeat for our fur­ry com­pan­ions. Still, even though Pixar essen­tial­ly got there first 20 years ago with Toy Sto­ry, ​‘what pets do at home’ is an intrigu­ing set-up for a fea­ture-length com­put­er-ani­mat­ed com­e­dy – one you’d expect any screen­writer worth their salt to real­ly go wild with. So how is it that this lat­est ven­ture from Illu­mi­na­tion Enter­tain­ment, the peo­ple who brought you Despi­ca­ble Me and Min­ions, turned out so… tame?

The first and most glar­ing prob­lem is that the entire sell of this movie is used sim­ply to book­end a stock big city caper that is nev­er as fun­ny or as inter­est­ing as the basic premise. No soon­er are we shown a glimpse into the pri­vate habits of var­i­ous domes­ti­cat­ed crit­ters – includ­ing an adren­a­line-junkie budgie and a poo­dle with a pen­chant for speed met­al, who should have been giv­en a lot more screen time – than we’re let loose in New York City, chas­ing a shag­gy dog tale that direc­tors Chris Renaud and Yarrow Cheney fail to keep a leash on. It’s unusu­al to chas­tise a film for being too ambi­tious in scope, but you get the sense that if the film­mak­ers had kept things sim­ple, nar­ra­tive­ly speak­ing, The Secret Life of Pets might have actu­al­ly worked.

The greater issue here, how­ev­er, is one of scale. Part of the mag­ic of the Toy Sto­ry films – not to men­tion oth­er obvi­ous touch points like Oliv­er & Com­pa­ny and The Brave Lit­tle Toast­er – is that they allow us to see the world from a dif­fer­ent, pint-sized point of view. The urban set­ting may be instant­ly famil­iar but we don’t real­ly expe­ri­ence or explore it from the pets’ per­spec­tive, and as such it nev­er feels like an espe­cial­ly daunt­ing or excit­ing place to get lost in.

In fact, despite run­ning into trou­ble at prac­ti­cal­ly every turn – pri­mar­i­ly in the form of a socio­path­ic bun­ny named Snow­ball (Kevin Hart) and his under­ground ter­ror­ist syn­di­cate ​‘Flushed Pets’ (band name!) – the film’s two canine pro­tag­o­nists, Max (Louis CK) and Duke (Ernest Ston­estreet), nav­i­gate Man­hat­tan with rel­a­tive ease over the course of a sin­gle event­ful day. They even luck out by break­ing into a wiener fac­to­ry com­plete­ly unim­ped­ed, at which point their home­ward jour­ney takes a brief detour into Willy Wonka/​Some­where in Dream­land ter­ri­to­ry. It’s a sur­re­al scene that frankly doesn’t fit with the rest of the film, but at least it breaks the tedious cycle of poop jokes, dis­ori­ent­ing set pieces and sub­lim­i­nal Min­ions marketing.