Here’s a movie for very small children about a nice dog that, when moved 400 miles away from its person in Denver, makes a two-year journey through the Rocky Mountains, escaping coyotes, befriending cougars, and battling starvation to reunite with its person.
Is it a good movie? Yes, for very small children who can’t tell good CGI from horrendous CGI, or ascertain that the bad dogcatcher is waaay too zealous about his job, or that dogs are intelligent and loyal but probably don’t sound like Bryce Dallas Howard trying really, really hard to read a script that sounds like it was written by a second grader.
‘Toad’
“Toad” is the name of the character that director Charles Martin Smith played in the smash hit “American Graffiti” (1973), and my theory is that becoming famous as Toad is how he got his start directing animal movies. Or maybe it was his playing beloved animal-story author Farley Mowat in “Never Cry Wolf” (1983). Anyway, Smith’s directed “Air Bud” (1997), “Dolphin Tale” (2011), and “Dolphin Tale 2” (2014).I could write a whole review about the character of Toad. Who can forget him pulling into iconic Mel’s Diner on a Vespa, in a pink shirt and white bucks, screeching to a stop, then accidentally hitting the gas and brake simultaneously, skitter-crashing into a garbage can, with one white-shoe'd foot hysterically hopping around trying to brake—and then him trying to play it off as cool?
The Way Home
Bella, the female pit bull, is a rescue pup. Her med-student/rescuer is Lucas (Jonah Hauer-King), a very treacly nice young man. He wants the puppy for the purpose of making his mom, Terri (Ashley Judd), feel better. She’s a U.S. Army vet with PTSD, although we don’t see any PTSD because that might traumatize the audience.A Dog’s Real Purpose
Bella’s adventures include a dog pack, being briefly owned by a couple, and also by a homeless vet (Edward James Olmos). There are many, many military vets in this movie. Maybe because military personnel usually have lives that are one long, journey home.“A Dog’s Purpose” had the spiritual angle of reincarnation, which was supposed to bolster the idea that a dog’s primary purpose is to take care of the various persons it encounters during its various incarnations, with the meta-purpose being to get back to its original person.
In “A Dog’s Way Home,” you get the same purposing of dogs, but without the reincarnation: It’s just one giant slog of doggo-forbearance to get back to person No. 1. But if that’s a dog’s purpose, and a wolf is a sort of dog, what’s a wolf’s purpose? Well! A wolf is a canine but not a dog. A wolf’s purpose has, like, a lot more howling and pack activity. Whatever. I’m waiting for the movies about the meta-purpose of dogs, wolves, and really, animals in general, with lots of reincarnation thrown in the mix.
See, some people got depressed watching multiple dogs die in “A Dog’s Purpose.” Not me. I found it exhilarating. Because the dog bounced right back into a new life! Is that not much more positive and hope-giving? Someone needs to make the “The Purpose of Animals” movie soon, because today’s vegans need hope.
Today’s activist-vegans are massively depressed because their view is fundamentally atheist. The thinking goes, “If there was a compassionate God, he would not let animals suffer such cruelty.” Somebody needs to do the sixfold Buddhist-path version of these dog movies that introduces the concept of reincarnation into dog existence. It would then continue on from there to illustrate the fluidity of souls between human, animal, plant, and mineral incarnations—due to the amounts of karma accumulated. That’s the next step in this purpose-of-all-earthly-existence lesson: karma.
