The Secret Life of Pets

About the film

Contains story spoilers.

The Secret Life of Pets turns an owner's absence into an opening for another version of the city. Apartment doors close on apparently ordinary animals, and their private routines begin. The 2016 Illumination film, directed by Chris Renaud with Yarrow Cheney as co-director, gives its New York pets voices, friendships and arguments while keeping many of their concerns recognizably domestic. A favourite place to sleep, a food supply and the return of a particular person can matter more than anything the humans are doing outside. Its central dog, Max, understands home as a stable relationship with Katie. Introducing another dog changes that relationship before the larger adventure begins, making a journey across the city depend on an argument about belonging inside one room.

Katie adopts Duke, and Max resents sharing her apartment and affection. Their rivalry leaves them without collars and in animal control's custody. Snowball, a rabbit leading abandoned animals in the sewers, frees them, then turns against them when their pretence of hating humans is exposed. Gidget organizes the neighbourhood pets to find Max. Meanwhile, Max and Duke seek Duke's former owner and discover that he has died. Duke is recaptured, and Max reluctantly cooperates with Snowball when animal control also takes members of his gang. A rescue on the Brooklyn Bridge sends the van into the river, but Snowball helps free Duke. The pets return home; Max accepts Duke, and Snowball allows a little girl to adopt him. The household has expanded instead of restoring the exclusive arrangement Max wanted.

Max's jealousy is understandable within the limited world he has built, even though it makes his behaviour toward Duke ungenerous. He has treated Katie's affection as something secured by being her only dog. Duke's presence suggests that the same person can care for somebody else, which Max initially experiences as a loss rather than an addition. Their differences are expressed through size and movement as well as dialogue: Duke can occupy space Max previously controlled without needing an argument to announce it. The small apartment makes those changes unavoidable. Getting lost forces the dogs to rely on qualities they disliked at home, but the deeper adjustment concerns what they think companionship allows. Max has to stop making another animal's removal a condition of his own security.

Duke brings a history Max does not initially recognize. For Max, the newcomer seems to be taking something already his; for Duke, Katie's home follows a separation he has not understood. Learning about the former owner gives their rivalry another context. A dog can remember being wanted without knowing why that relationship ended, and the inability to ask the absent person leaves room for mistaken explanations. Eric Stonestreet's larger, rougher character consequently has a vulnerability distinct from his physical presence. The journey toward the old home is an attempt to recover an earlier certainty, while the return to Katie depends on accepting that another relationship can become meaningful. The film's different homes are attachments carried by animals, rather than interchangeable buildings that simply provide shelter.

Snowball's sewer community supplies an alternative account of those attachments. Its members define themselves through abandonment and make hostility toward people a basis for solidarity. Kevin Hart gives the rabbit an expansive voice and rapid changes of emphasis that sit inside a body associated with softness and vulnerability. That contrast lets an apparently harmless animal perform the role of a militant leader. The group also creates a hidden city beneath the apartment pets' familiar one, where different experiences produce different expectations of humans. Max and Duke cannot assume that sharing a species or an ability to speak makes them accepted members. Their invented story of rebellion exposes how much the gang's belonging depends on a particular explanation of where an animal came from and whom it should distrust.

Gidget's search creates another moving community, built around an attachment rather than a rejection. Jenny Slate's Pomeranian has to persuade animals with different habits and risks to contribute to finding Max. The hawk Tiberius makes that cooperation particularly awkward because a potential helper can also be a predator. Each recruit changes how the group can move through the environment, giving the rescue a range of physical possibilities rather than simply adding more characters to follow. Apartment animals know parts of the city the humans do not notice: a route suited to one body may be inaccessible to another. The animation repeatedly changes scale around those bodies, turning ordinary urban surfaces into obstacles, hiding places or paths. New York becomes a collection of overlapping animal environments beneath its recognizable skyline.

The film's broad movement from domestic routines into chases does not make home disappear as its destination. Food, furniture and the expectation of a returning owner remain the points around which the adventure has meaning. Even Snowball's final change is expressed through accepting someone's attention rather than making a speech withdrawing his former programme. The closing reunions put animals back into spaces the opening established, with changed relationships inside them. Max still has Katie, but his satisfaction no longer requires Duke to be somewhere else. The secret life imagined by the title is therefore not only a fantasy of what pets do while people work. It is a network of dependencies and choices that the owners cannot see, continuing beside the simple daily fact that a door will eventually open again.