10 Dark Theories About Family Movies That Actually Make Sense

On the surface, The Secret Life of Pets is just another anthropomorphic animation filled with slapstick humour and vaguely moral life lessons. Basically, as some critics have summed it up, it’s Toy Story but with pets. But esteemed political science professor Dr Jason Johnson believes there’s much more going on than meets the eye.

In the movie we see two domesticated, privileged dogs mistaken for strays by animal control who escape with the help of an underground group of renegade animals discarded by their former owners and dubbed the Flushed Pets. We learn from their rabbit leader Snowball (voiced by Kevin Hart) that they’re out to exact revenge on the humans that took them in and then abandoned them.

It doesn’t take a giant leap of logic, Johnson says, to see Snowball and the Flushed Pets as a clumsy allegory for America’s black militant movements and their human oppressors as America’s privileged white population.

A racial allegory in a kids’ movie isn’t a bad thing in and of itself but when it’s played for laughs it tends to trivialise the issue it’s representing. Snowball’s character arc, in which he eventually saves the day and becomes a domesticated pet himself, speaks volumes within the context of cack-handed racial parable by essentially saying his strife ends as soon as he assimilates into domesticated (white) culture.

Basically, The Secret Life of Pets is racist propaganda for kids.