Promos for the movie have sold it as imagining an alternate reality wherein animals get up to zany hijinks while their owners are at work. Pets isn’t exactly faith-in-humanity restoring in the manner of Wall-E or Inside Out, but at the end of a week in which mankind has illustrated some of its most dismal traits, there’s something quietly therapeutic about spending 90 minutes with some nutty, heroic furballs on a hero’s journey with very low stakes.
It has cats, too, and a moronic guinea pig, and a homicidal bunny, and a carnivorous hawk, and a pig with tattoos, but the primary reason for the movie’s appeal is its ability to comprehend the bizarre fidelity of dogs to their humans. A snow-white cotton ball of a dog named Gidget who has attachment issues. A big, schlubby, emotionally inconsistent dog named Duke who looks a bit like a Snuffleupagus. The Secret Life of Pets is by no means great art, but what saves it from being a hugely predictable Toy Story ripoff/monomyth-by-numbers is simply the fact that it has dogs. Eddie the Jack Russell was indisputably the least irritating character on Frasier. White Fang saved a judge from a murderous criminal. When Odysseus returned to Ithaca and disguised himself as a beggar, Argos recognized his owner even when his best friend, Eumaeus, couldn’t. Great art has occasionally had the acuity to recognize that dogs are superior to humans.
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