The Secret Life of Pets - Overly formulaic and incredibly asinine
The Secret Life of Pets is a lesson in the things that Illumination Entertainment needs to improve on. While the action almost never stops and some of the main characters are well developed, the animation of the film is subpar and most of the jokes are all slapstick. The combination makes for a movie that falls on the scale of fun, but holds itself back for thinking its audience can’t handle anything above the stereotype of a brainless children’s film.
Max is the happiest dog in New York. His owner Katie loves him, he has a nice home, and nothing to complain about. Until Katie brings home Duke, a shaggy annoyance that steals too much of Katie’s love. When they both get themselves into trouble during their walk and get captured by an underground gang of pets against humans, they have to escape and get back to Katie.
When it comes to character development The Secret Life of Pets is average. While there are plenty of moments to develop the backstories and motivations of our central protagonists Max and Duke, those moments are ruined by an overabundance of slapstick comedy instead of actual genuine personality. Duke’s terrified look when he thinks he will be taken back to the pound is so effective, but is immediately undercut for comedy sake. Thankfully, these moments are few and far between, and normally because the plot has such a fast momentum that you feel invested in its resolution. The performances from Louis C.K. and Eric Stonestreet are very convincing. While most other characters fall flat and feel stereotyped, Duke and Max feel fully realized. At times they are hard characters to like, but their motivations and fears feel honest and real enough that you feel attracted to their story. Characters like Gidget, voiced by the hilarious Jenny Slate, and the Flushed Pets leader Snowball (Kevin Hart) are funny but fall flat from a character perspective. Snowball is especially troublesome, while his character has genuinely funny moments, he becomes stale very quick, often regressing into just screaming and flailing as a humor device.
That’s the main problem with The Secret Life of Pets, is that its humor is often too much. It leans on the side of overbearing and often is cringe-worthy. An already funny sequence in a hot dog factory becomes creepy when it turns into a hallucinatory fever dream of singing hot dogs jumping into dog’s mouths. The animation that went into that sequence instead of focusing on better character models is agonizing to comprehend. That’s another problem with Pets, it doesn’t look good. The cartoonish art style is fine but the design doesn’t work. It looks like early 2000s level animation and except for a few key scenes it just looks so boring, especially compared to Finding Dory and Zootopia which are visually stunning for every single shot.
It is hard to have fun with a movie that injects this much familiarity in it. When its humor wants to be clever it is exceedingly clever, and when it falls back into average slapstick, at least it is done well. Yet the art style is really distracting and drab. It establishes itself as a movie afraid to take risks, one that engrains itself into a formula that works for kids, instead of challenging its audience’s perspective, or opting for clever approaches to its humor. Yes, it is a silly kid’s movie, and not all kid’s movies need to be Pixar, but this one has moments where it tries to break the mold, so when it regresses back to fluff it is just disappointing.