The title pretty much says it all. “Pets on a Train,” a co-production of US and French studios, is an animated film about a runaway train, featuring pets of various species and personalities as the only passengers, along with a wily raccoon named Falcon and a very serious police dog named Rex. It is by no means a classic, but it is a welcome entry for the overlooked audience too old for “Gabby’s Dollhouse” and too young for “TRON: Ares.” The voice talent and character design are second-tier, and there are too many characters. But the action scenes are exciting, and the pacing, along with its reassuring humor and some nice character arcs, makes it a mildly appealing watch.
Falcon (we learn the origin of his nickname later in the film) is something of a Robin Hood for street animals, stealing food from picnickers and other places to give to his friends. It is almost Christmas, and he has been planning a big heist from a train to create a bountiful holiday feast. His close pigeon friend advises him not to trust the gravelly-voiced badger named Hans, who has been guiding Falcon on the process of hacking the train’s navigation. But Falcon is optimistic and trusting. He is so eager to help his friends that he insists everything is under control.
It is not. As soon as Falcon has hacked the train’s controls, Hans, safely sitting at a desk watching the progress on screen, sends out a recorded announcement, telling all of the human passengers and train personnel to disembark. Once they are off, the train begins to hurtle toward a certain crash.
Falcon gets the key to open the pets’ cages in the train’s baggage car. They include a pair of hippie rabbits, with the female expecting a baby, Victor, a snobby British purebred dog, a cold-blooded but warm-hearted green snake named Ana (as in Anaconda) who has appeared in music videos with her rap star owner, a canary and a high-strung parrot who never learned to fly, Maggie, a well-traveled and level-headed spotted cat, a turtle and a clownfish who are minor celebrities because they appear in commercials, a duck, and two pets a small, and two pets used for likes by social media influencer owners, an agitated, sugar-addicted dog and a cat.
What worked best for me was the mechanics. The pet’s-eye level camera angle and dolly shots are dynamic. The film takes full and engaging advantage of everything that can go wrong on a runaway train, almost “Mission: Impossible”-level peril over, under, and inside the train, with an excellent rendition of the shifts in gravity and the propulsive effects of speeding around the curves. Every emergency—having to decouple the cars, escaping a fire, crossing an unstable bridge—feels visceral and exciting. The effort to give every animal some kind of backstory does not work well, but the best character work comes in the action scenes as some of the animals panic and others rise—or fly—to the occasion. The rigging (internal structure) of the animal movements is also first-rate, and the animators have a lot of fun with the movements and capabilities of the various reptiles, birds, and mammals.
The film struggles to understand its intended audience, with references like “I love the smell of ketchup in the morning” and digs at social media and fatuous, exploitive television newscasters, which are unlikely to resonate with either children or their parents. How many kids will understand a character’s disappointment at being relegated to “day player” parts when he wants to be a star? How many will be upset that the villain wants to kill an entire train full of animals to get revenge on one?
They are more likely to appreciate a couple of instances of potty humor and the transformation from wariness to partnership between the cop/dog and the robber/raccoon, but those elements get lost in the midst of so many distractions. The concept and the main character have a lot of potential, but they are overwhelmed by a cluttered storyline.
