The cute talking pigs of the Babe films taught audiences to love real animals with CGI human-talking mouths; I myself was always agnostic, finding them lacking in both the unadorned charm of live-action animals and the complete ingenuity of animations. But this brutally funny stoner comedy about four pottymouthed stray dogs on an incredible quest has changed my mind. You’ll believe a dog can talk – and be extremely abusive.
Writer-producer Dan Perrault, known chiefly for his true-crime docu-spoof American Vandal, and director, Josh Greenbaum, have created a cheerfully offensive comedy about stray dogs trekking across America, with their own issues around abuse, abandonment and emotional PTSD, as well as who to hump and when. I like to think they were inspired by the much-loved 1963 live-action Disney classic The Incredible Journey about the English bull terrier, yellow labrador and Siamese cat that trek 300 miles across the Canadian wilderness to get home. In the Disney film, however, none of the animals was in jail, trying to extend their prodigious genitals through the cell bars in a nailbiting quest to unhook the keys.
