2 months ago
13
Pets on a Train
★★
(PG) 87 minutes
Even by the standards of CGI family entertainment, there’s a piecemeal quality to Pets on a Train, which was made in France but aims to keep its origins under wraps, at least in the version released in Australia, an English-language dub with a mostly Canadian voice cast.
Pets on a Train: Trapped on a runaway express.Credit: NIXCO
The story starts out shortly before Christmas in a city on the US west coast, judging from the palm trees, the Spanish mission architecture and the gags at the expense of showbiz stereotypes, though the cityscapes are done in a quasi-realistic style that evokes a European cartooning tradition – Tintin rather than Disney or Dr Seuss.
More in the Hollywood mould is the wide-eyed yet slippery hero Maurice (voiced by Wyatt Bowen), a daredevil raccoon who prefers to be known as the Falcon and fancies himself as a master criminal, though his typical exploits don’t go far beyond swiping hot dogs from street carts.
Lured into taking part in a more elaborate heist, he’s double-crossed by a malignant badger (Chimwemwe Miller) and finds himself trapped on a runaway train hurtling towards all-but-certain destruction.
While there are no human passengers on board, a number of animals are locked in cages in the luggage compartment, among them a suspicious police dog (Tristan D. Lalla), a snobbish greyhound (Terrence Scammell), and quite a few others (too many, in fact, for any of them to emerge as characters we can fully invest in). Can our hero set them free, win their trust and lead them to safety?
The characters face a series of puzzles in Pets on a Train.Credit: © TAT productions, Apollo Films Distribution, France 3 Cinéma, Kinologic
At this point in the story, the view out the window looks a lot like the Mojave Desert, which geographically is logical enough. Then without much warning we find ourselves in a different landscape altogether, the train winding round grey, misty mountains as if we’d progressed from one level to the next in a video game.
Indeed, a video game is what Pets on a Train mostly resembles – treating a whimsically arbitrary, blatantly derivative plot line as the basis for a series of logic puzzles, which the characters must band together to solve before time runs out.
For co-directors Benoit Daffis and Jean-Christian Tassy, the biggest puzzle would have been how to make the most of limited resources. But like calculating directors of B-movies everywhere, they find ways to use music, sound and abrupt editing to make it feel as if we’re getting more spectacle than we really do.
They also deliver one moment of genuine surrealism, although you could almost blink and miss it. A minute or so into the opening credits, the train is zooming towards the station in the middle of the city when for no apparent reason it topples over, landing on its side in an empty park.
The next bit is straight out of Monty Python, or else The Lego Movie. A giant hand reaches into the shot and picks up the train, presumably to replace it on the track – at which point we cut away, and the story continues as if none of this had occurred.
Some questions do linger, though. If the whole movie that follows takes place on an impossibly elaborate model train set, who’s really at the controls? God? Santa, who shows up at almost the same moment as a mascot for a nearby store? A fortunate child who got their presents early?
As with everything in Pets on a Train, it’s best not to overthink this, especially as Daffis and Tassy don’t break the fourth wall anywhere near as blatantly elsewhere. But even at under 90 minutes, the film drags on long enough that I did start to wonder if a second Christmas miracle might save some time.
Pets on a Train is in cinemas Thursday
