Well, they did it again: I like the production design of The Secret Life of Pets. It's by Eric Guillon, who doubles as the character designer - the same role he filled on The Lorax, how about that, and he performed both tasks in Despicable Me 2 and Minions, both of which did indeed have fairly enjoyable '60s-pastiche worlds to play around in (DM2 much more so than Minions). So I think there's a possibility that I've just uncovered the secret genius behind the Illumination throne. At the very least, I have now positively identified the man responsible for almost everything I've genuinely admired in any of the studio's movies.
But as I was saying, the production design in The Secret Life of Pets is pretty appealing. Especially in the early going, when the film consists of several diorama-sized scenes taking place in various apartments in a building somewhere in Manhattan. The building itself looks like a festive doll's house, cherry-red exterior walls with big windows letting us peek inside; the individual apartments are filled with fun shapes in joyous summertime colors, and they overlook an autumnal Central Park that's decked out in candy apple red and tangerine orange. It's like crack for your color receptors: one little glance and all you want to do is stare and stare until your eyes dry out.
There is unfortunately a movie attached to the colors.
The easy slam against The Secret Life of Pets is that it's shameless carbon copy of Toy Story, which is hardly fair. There are at least two scenes stolen from Toy Story 2. It is the tale of two dogs, a little brown and white terrier named Max (Louis C.K.), who has a dog's natural undying devotion and zealous worshipfulness towards his human owner, Katie (Ellie Kemper), and believes them to be uniquely connected among soulmates. This makes it acutely painful when she brings home another dog one day after work, the giant brown hairball Duke (Eric Stonestreet), some kind of apparent Newfoundland mix. The two dogs are assholes who hate each other, and their increasingly hostile attempts to win Katie's solitary affection leads to both of them ending lost on the streets during a routine walk. There ensues a picaresque as they traverse the city, the sewers, and a Brooklyn sausage factory, all trying to make it home. Meanwhile, the hyper Pomeranian who lives across the alley and loves Max, Gidget (Jenny Slate) is spearheading a rescue mission of several pets from the apartment building to find Max and bring him home. These include Mel the pug (Bobby Moynihan), Buddy the dachshund (Hannibal Buress), Chloe the cat (Lake Bell), Tiberius the uncomfortably hungry hawk (Albert Brooks), Norman the guinea pig (co-director Chris Renaud, one of Illumination's brain trust), and Sweet Pea the parakeet who is alone among the animals in this universe in being incapable of speech (its peeps are, however, provided by Tara Strong - what the hell, how did a professional voice actor stumble her way into this cast?).
In fairness, The Secret Life of Pets is not "bad". It is enormously uninspired. The ad campaign that has been completely inescapable for months has promised a one-joke exercise in pandering to pet owners ("see, the cartoon doggie acts like a real doggie") with content at least marginally less inspired than the pictures of adorable animals with grammatically broken captions which were, alongside pornography, the primary fuel of the internet in the 2000s. That's still better than the movie we actually get, which is that for only the first five or ten minutes (virtually every joke about the actual things pets do when we're not around showed up in at least one of the I've forgotten how many trailers), and is afterwards a desultory chase movie like every other animated kids' movie produced in the last 15 years (including 2016's second "animals drive a truck" finale). Occasionally, it wakes up for a bit of old-school slapstick that works fairly well, and at one point, it grinds to a halt for an extended fantasy sequence about singing frankfurters that's so surreal in ways that nothing else in the movie even gestures towards, that I am incapable of resisting its warped charm.
The comedy, however, is resolutely limited, mostly revolving around giving each character a solitary personality trait - Chloe is bored, Gidget is peppy, Tiberius is a carnivore, Mel is Dug from Up - and deploying one incredibly obvious joke per scene playing on that trait. At least once or twice, it switches things up and stages action to an obvious pop song choice: Taylor Swift's "Welcome to New York" accompanies the opening montage of Max's pre-Duke life with Katie, and it's almost restful, it's so patently mindless.
At times the film threatens to become interesting: during their adventures, Max and Duke fall in with a subterranean resistance cell of human-hating ex-pets led by psychopathic rabbit Snowball (Kevin Hart). There's the stuff of an entire movie in there, and the bad pets include some of the film's most inspired character designs - I particularly love the UPA-ish angular lines of the alligators, though they'd probably be better in 2-D - and most unexpected lines and jokes. Plus, Hart is, along with Slate, just about the only member of the cast who sounds like he had a good time recording his dialogue. But sure enough, after maybe his third scene, Snowball is just "cute bunny says violent things", and that's a well that dries up pretty quickly.
Still, it's really not a charmless movie, only a predictable, sitcommy one that's designed for parents to muscle through while the kids laugh aimlessly. Except for Max and Duke. They are terrible characters. Or rather, they are great characters if this is supposed to be an animated equivalent of one of those '70s chamber dramas about masculinity in free-fall, like Elaine May's Mikey and Nicky. And I find Mikey and Nicky fascinating and I would love to see a thoughtful cartoon version of it, but I think The Secret Life of Pets gets there quite accidentally, and by "accidentally" I of course mean "because the screenwriters were bad a their jobs". These are not sympathetic characters: they are bitter, sniping, cruel; Max tries to blackmail Duke, Duke threatens violence against Max, and their hatred is the most psychologically convincing element in the entire movie. In theory, the film should be about their learning to support each other and work together, all Woody & Buzz-like; this development happens using sleight-of-hand, with the film distracting us long enough with a chase setpiece involving a giant snake and sewers that it simply assumes, after it's all done, that they did their bonding somewhere in there. The worse problem is that they're unpleasant to be around: it's not very interesting to see how they survive their predicaments, since they're both so damn unsympathetic, and it's even harder to root for Gidget's rescue attempts, since it's not hard to suppose she'd be better off without Max and her ridiculous, one-note crush on him.
The whole thing is just vacuous - clearly the kind of vacuous that appeals to enormous portions of the movie-going public, and good for them. I find nothing amusing nor appealing in the film, and absolutely not even the ghost of anything emotionally resonant, just a lot of clattering stock ingredients reassembled in the laziest way possible. It looks nice, and the characters have a certain amount of old-school rubberiness in their faces and bodies, even if there's not much done with them in the shackles of 3-D. Also, we've now finally crossed that Rubicon where animated children's movies are prepared to spend real time and effort to give their cartoon cat a visible anus. How about that!
5/10
...woof.
ReplyDeleteThe only reason why this is sitting at 6/10 for me (some nice soft colours they got in there) is because it was preceded by the single most awful thing I had watched all year. I cannot believe a short movie could be this bad, it physically hurt me to watch...that...perpetrate itself on its audience. A splatter of gags with no build-up or sense of comic timing, with a cast of characters that laugh at their own jokes. The silence in my kid-filled auditorium on that Saturday night was DEAFENING.
Compared to that, that sad Toy Story 2 ripoff scene was comfortable in its ineptitude to copy Toy Story 2 properly.
I actually liked Mower Minions a wee tiny hair, just because it was a reminder that the characters can actually be decent slapstick comedians in small doses & not as the inescapable corporate icons they became with Despicable Me 2. That being said, the "hyperventilate into a bag of dog shit" gag was one of the worst things I have ever encountered in all my years of being annoyed by potty humor.
ReplyDeleteThe most obvious problem with this movie (aside from the near-total lack of plot) is that it has way, way too many characters, a lot of whom feel like they were just thrown in to max out the merchandising range. Personally, I'd have lost the pug (the pug and the dachshund could easily have been merged into a single character), the budgie (doesn't really do anything beyond that one gag at the start of the film) and the cat (who was basically only there to be the "token cat" in a main cast dominated by dogs). I did like the hawk (the one "main" pet who apparently wasn't considered marketable enough to show up on any merchandise), but I wasn't a fan of how his character essentially just faded into the background as the story went on - apparently his desire to seize and devour smaller creatures ceases to be an issue after a couple of scenes, and he goes from being a fairly sinister presence to just another generic head in an already immensely-cluttered cast.
ReplyDeleteI'm a little torn on the film's final sequence, which is undeniably charming and will certainly pull upon the heartstrings of anyone who's ever owned and bonded with a pet within their lifetime. The story and this particular bunch of characters (particularly the two main dogs, who are a pair of total tossers) don't exactly feel as if they've "earned" it though.
Totally agree with Scampy on the excess of characters. I thought Max's neighbors and the underground pets were enough, and in a good way. If the writers fleshed out and created arcs for those characters akin to Finding Dory, it could have really been charming. I particularly liked Kevin Hartt's bunny.
ReplyDeleteBut the film just threw in more and more characters to keep things moving for lack of ideas. I literally thought, "oh no" when the godfatherish limp dog was introduced bc it made me give up on any payoffs for the characters who were introduced. Gigdet's martial arts abilities in the end seriously came out of nowhere. She could have at least watched a similar scene in the telenovela (and that telenovela scene should have been in Spanish - it was visually funny enough). And the dog who makes the peanut butter comment in the beginning - that goes nowhere whatsoever.
I feel DM2 had a lot of random gags, but to a better effect because the minion interludes stricture the film, but Pets is set up that we expect the setups to pay off. Wasted opportunity is the best word to sum up a review.
Not wasted, more like "missed opportunity."
ReplyDelete"that telenovela scene should have been in Spanish - it was visually funny enough"
ReplyDeleteYES. I almost brought this up in the review, but I felt it would have crossed the line from "sensible critic raising important points" to "obnoxious nitpicking hater finding things to bitch about". It would have been a way better scene, though.
And I think KayMartha and Scampy are both dead right: so many characters that they all feel disposable. Which makes it even more annoying that the only ones we stick with are the two most objectionable. "A pair of total tossers" is a top-notch way of describing them.
Look, I'm aware that animation is capable of things like Kubo and the Two Strings, but I thought Secret Life of Pets was a total blast. Not a great work of art by any means, but the feeling I got was that the QC on the script only lasted long enough to fill up the opening with scenes to poach for the trailers. "Have we got 60 seconds of dog jokes? Awesome. Just fill the rest with whatever".
ReplyDeleteAs a result, while none of the movie aimed particularly high, I felt like moment to moment it was just unpredictable enough in the execution that I was never bored and often pleasantly surprised. My favorite element was the treatment of the sequence involving Duke's past. If this had been a John Lasseter film, the scene would have dragged on endlessly, punctuated by a swelling string score and tears, punctuated by the movie's "Ohana means Family" type tagline which we would have heard three more times later in the film to make a point. I liked how in this one, Duke's reaction was swift and realistic, we got the point, and the plot moved on. Very well done.
And yes, the telenovela scene should have been in Spanish, but now we're getting into "everyone in Wreck-it Ralph should have been rendered in 8-bit" territory and that will get us nowhere except reminding me why I hate Wreck-it Ralph so much.
Oh, and Mower Minions was an abomination. Honestly the Minions are making me miss the Raving Rabbids, and that's very unfortunate.
ReplyDeletenice
ReplyDeleteWhen a pet parent decides to keep dogs that will spend more time indoors and got cats too, they must take into consideration that there must be a compatibility between both breeds or else, a daily mayhem inside your home can happen. Now, I’ve been looking for indoor dog breeds and this list pretty much gave me a good idea: http://dogsaholic.com/breeds/info/best-indoor-dogs.html
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