Not that The Secret Life of Pets isn’t diverting and occasionally funny or cute, but the result lacks distinctiveness and creativity, standing as nothing more than an animated bauble. Co-directors Chris Renaud and Yarrow Cheney take what could have been an effortlessly simple idea and, in typical Illumination fashion (they’re the studio behind Despicable Me and Minions), dumb down the material for the lowest common denominator. Although it takes place in a world where humans own pets (as opposed to a Disney-esque world like Zootopia, in which talking animals fill human roles), the movie explores, for a while anyway, what our dogs, cats, and other pets are up to when people aren’t around. Many pet owners create voices for their domesticated animals, and here’s a movie in which pets speak in those voices, behaving in ways only humans could imagine for them. In The Secret Life of Pets, Illumination Entertainment preys on those of us with a penchant for anthropomorphizing our furry friends.

Secret life of pets movie scenes