Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Pets’ on Disney+, A Bryce Dallas Howard-Directed Doc About Humans And Their Furry Friends

In Pets, which streams on Disney+, director Bryce Dallas Howard places front and center the bond that is built between humans and their animal companions. From interviews with kids – “Your house feels more full when you have animals along with you” – to profiles of people whose love for animals led them to work with shelters, fosters, and sanctuaries, Pets finds a balance between the cute-tastic stuff – nothing wrong with any of that stuff being in here; we totally need it – and asking after the deeper meanings about what’s behind the timeless human-animal connection. “They’re not people, but it feels, like, so intense.” 

PETS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: Look, here’s the math on pets, and it’s not in dispute. “Basically, birds are 16% in popularity, cats are 38, dogs are 59, guinea pigs, mouses, or any type of rodent are 20, so, like – actually, I’ll go from lowest to highest. Spiders are five or ten percent popularity…”

As one kid in Pets earnestly breaks down the numbers as he understands them, and the doc tries to keep up with humorous onscreen notes, what’s most clear is how we human beings have elevated the importance of animal companionship to a quantifiable level. The children interviewed in Pets, while some of the accompanying footage approaches AFV, “America, America, this is you” levels of poop-cleaning and pets-crashing-through-screen-doors pratfalls, also unconditionally accept that people just need pets. When their parents or their friends don’t understand them, their dogs and cats do. When another little boy, Trevor, describes how his dog Bilbo came into his life, it’s with the acknowledgement that they are the same. “We both had to have some surgeries” – boy and his dog both have cleft lips and palettes – “so he understands me a lot.”

It’s an understanding shared by the adults Pets profiles, too. Sergi Basoli, a Spanish sea kayaking enthusiast, found what he thought was a solo adventure enlivened with the addition of Nirvana, a scrappy 15-pound Italian street dog Basoli adopted and converted into a canine seafarer. (Cue some fantastic footage of Nirvana riding on the kayak’s bow, complete with his own life preserver and waterproof slicker.) When Rodney Stotts got involved with ecological conservation as an escape from the rough Washington, DC neighborhood where he was raised, it unlocked his lifelong appreciation for all the inhabitants of the natural world. Today, Stotts is a falconer. And in Nagoya, Japan, we meet Shinobu Takahashi, who started a rescue shelter for at-risk dogs no other shelters could rescue. His inspiration? Duca, his pet longhaired dachshund, and the namesake of his business. “I needed rescuing myself, which my dog did for me.”

Can you build an entire documentary around the sentiment behind one of those “Who Saved Who” pet paw bumper stickers? Bryce Dallas Howard can. Elsewhere in Pets we meet Travis and Adam, whose adoption of a puppy through the Sato Project – which finds homes for dogs abandoned in Puerto Rico – brings them closer as a couple and gives their senior dog Delilah some life-affirming excitement in her old age. “To have another dog in the house, to give [Delilah] a new lease on life,” Adam says is the goal. But it is the lives of every individual in the house – them, the dogs, and their cats – that come to feel renewed.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Netflix features Inside the Mind of a Cat and the Rob Lowe-narrated Inside the Mind of a Dog – both add scientific comment onto the usual layers of cutesy. And Stray is an incredibly powerful document of Istanbul’s thriving population of street dogs.

Performance Worth Watching: Surely there are a billion kids out there with hot takes on owning a feathered or furry or slithery otherwise mammalian friend. But Pets seems to have found the right ones to put a microphone in front of, and sometimes they offer quotes with a composure that goes beyond their years. “Pets are magical beings sent here to help us live our own lives.”

Memorable Dialogue: “We always describe Ziggy as like a toddler in a pig suit.” Though Pets puts a lot of focus on dogs, there is also insight about people’s connections with other animals, like a couple in North Carolina and Ziggy, their 300-pound indoor/outdoor “mini pig.”   

Sex and Skin: Unless you’re talking about Ziggy the Pig, luxuriating in his custom-built wet-dry health spa, the answer to this prompt is “No way.”

Our Take: “When we think about how much animals have healed the human heart, it’s immeasurable.” Interviewed in Pets, Shinobu Takahashi is talking about his specific experience. But Takahashi’s perspective can certainly be applied more broadly to the entire sector in which this documentary exists. It’s another example of a film where, if we could only put a camera and a mic in front of the animals themselves, we’d probably have the most insight. But because we can’t – a dog or cat describing how they were going through a bad breakup, but found support and a fresh start with their new owner – we instead listen to what these humans have to say about their personal experiences with animals, and can find commonalities within our own lives. Not everyone has a sea kayak and a need to teach their new dog new tricks. (Like the command for leaping safely from boat to rocky shore.) But everyone knows the feeling that makes Sergi Basoli’s eyes light up. “In only half a month, Nirvana knew so many things!”   

But what about the sad stuff, the “Rainbow Bridge” stuff, the inevitability that these human-animal bonds will end? Pets addresses this fact, but also this is Disney+, so it doesn’t dwell on it. Instead it frames the loss of a pet as just another part of it, offering more of what people of all ages can gain from the bold act of having them. Responsibility, and guardianship, and the reciprocity of tender loving care – from the perspective of so many of the people interviewed here, it’s all contained in the inimitable quality of having an animal lick your face. A unique kind of intimacy we can understand, even if we can’t interview the animal.

Our Call: Go ahead and Stream It for the cute overload – in part, it’s what Pets is here to celebrate. But Bryce Dallas Howard’s documentary also probes the urge, shared by people all over the world, to find their purpose through the love for and support of animals of all kinds.

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. 

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