'The Secret Life Of Pets' "Lacks Anything To Make It Memorable"

THE SECRET LIFE OF PETS

In the two decades since Toy Story, animation has been filled with variations — both on-brand and off — of the same theme: what if our __________ had rich, rewarding, comic lives behind our backs. In a year in which Sausage Party took that theme to hilarious, very-R-rated ends, the promise — and premise — of The Secret Life Of Pets seems weirdly quaint, not least of all because it’s spelt out in the title.

It starts out delivering all that promise of the premise: in a weirdly-sunny Manhattan apartment, a host of pets (led by Max, an exuberant terrier voiced by Louis C.K.) are left alone when their owners go off to work. They do things you expect (bark at squirrels), and things you don’t (party hard to Andrew W.K.). They think they’re in mutual relationships with their owners, and their ‘secret’ is mostly their independence: they move about, they’re friends with each other. At its best, the screenplay — by Brian Lynch, Cinco Paul, and Ken Daurio— plays up to things we already know and love about pets: dogs love balls, cats chase laser-pointers, they both hate vacuum cleaners, these things are funny when turned into YouTube videos.

But, shamelessly following genre tropes, The Secret Life Of Pets contrives an epic have-to-get-back-home quest. Soon Max and oversized, pound-scarred mutt Duke (Eric Stonestreet) are lost in the city, stripped of their collars; pursued by dog-catchers and evil cats. They’re lured into a lurid underworld in the sewers, where an ironically-murderous fluffy little bunny (Kevin Hart) leads an underground resistance of flushed and abandoned pets: iguanas, crocodiles, sea monkeys, tattooed pigs; emancipated creatures that abhor the mutually-beneficial slavery of pet-ownership.

The story grows more convoluted and ridiculous as it goes: following Finding Dory, this is the second talking-animal animation this year that climaxes with creatures stealing a vehicle, careening through traffic, driving it off a bridge, and needing to perform a last-minute sinking-into-a-river rescue. But the film —from Illumination, directed by Despicable Me-maker Chris Renaud — lacks the emotional pull, artistic coherence, and storytelling elegance of a Pixar picture. It’s bright, colourful, playful, but lacks anything to make it memorable.

PETE’S DRAGON

Disney’s spate of live-action catalogue-product remakes started out pretty generic —Tim Burton turning Alice In Wonderland into some post-LOTR battle-for-another-world— but, with every new appointed director, things seemed to get more unexpected. Sofia Coppola was appointed to remake The Little Mermaid, though eventually left the production. A Winnie The Pooh penned by Alex Ross Perry(!) is apparently a thing that will soon exist. And, here, now, a live-action re-version of Pete’s Dragon —one of Disney’s least-loved properties— has been brought to screen by David Lowery, AKA the guy who made the Malickian ex-con melodrama-as-tone-poem Ain’t Them Bodies Saints.

Lowery and co-writer Toby Halbrooks obliterate the original: there’s no musical numbers (though, there’s soundtrack songs by Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Okkervil River, and St. Vincent!), no staginess, no evil foster family. Instead, it’s a family fable told with warmth and humanity. Its dragon is a vessel for those evergreen kid’s-story themes: wonderment and magic; a symbol of childhood innocence and imagination; a creature that turns the everyday into miraculous. There’s open evocations of E.T., the film dividing its participants into those who respect the freedom and grandeur of its titular creature, and those who can look at it only through eyes clouded by fear or greed.

Its dragon is green, furry, almost dog-like; more mammalian than reptilian; a boy’s-best-friend on a colossal scale. Despite the acting mettle of the human cast —nine-year-old Oakes Fegley, Robert Redford, Bryce Dallas Howard, Wes Bentley— they’re playing second-fiddle to an animated creature; and, luckily, Weta Digital imbue the dragon with real warmth, tactility, character. Lowery’s most decisive stylistic decision proves to be a tone of pure earnestness. Though its titular character makes it, to some degree, a CGI spectacle, there’s none of the cynicism of the tentpole event-movie. Instead, Pete’s Dragon plays it so straight as to be pleasingly old-fashioned; a computer-aided marvel that feels folksy, handmade, time-worn, as if whittled out of wood.

THE RED TURTLE

The Red Turtle is the thinking-kid’s school-holiday entertainment. It’s a mythical fable told in silence, Dutch director Michaël Dudok de Wit marshalling the animated resources of Studio Ghibli —making their first-ever international production— for a film that looks, and feels, sublime. Befitting its wordless, 80-minute-long form, the story is slight: an unnamed man washes up on a deserted island. He builds rafts to attempt to escape, but each time he pushes out into the ocean, his raft is knocked to pieces by an unseen assailant: the mythical creature of the film’s title. So, instead of leaving the island, he makes it his home; eventually —improbably, mythically— with woman and child. The plot developments of The Red Turtle are few, but its pleasures many.

In developing the film with Ghibli legend Isao Takahata —who’s credited as Artistic Producer— de Wit has made an awe-inspiring animated depiction of nature, of weather. Winds and rains comes, palms sway, a bamboo grove feels dark, wet, fecund. Waves press onto the beach, rockpools fizz with life, water gathers in every nook and hollow. Insects buzz, frogs croak, terns cut through the sky, turtles through the sea. There’s a cast of crabs —that’s the collective noun!— who, in the early going, serve as secondary characters; equal parts watching audience and Greek chorus. Mostly, though, the animation —and the film itself— is a portrait of the ocean: ever-changing, forever-moving, deep and vast and mysterious; a whole unknowable world dwelling beneath the waves.