By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
I was having a talk with a 10-year-old the other day when we started talking movies. I knew his parents took him to see movies, so I was prepared for the discussion of Five Nights At Freddy’s, but then he asked me what movies I watched when I was his age. Immediately, I thought of some of the classics including Rookie of the Year, The Sandlot, The Brave Little Toaster, and for some reason, Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey. I had to explain that no, the animals weren’t really talking, but we heard their voices and yes, they did talk to each other that way. Very quickly, I realized that I sounded insane, and also, there were a ton of animal movies in the 90s. What happened to them? And more importantly, how did Shadow ever get out of that pit!?
The Trauma Of Homeward Bound
Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey is the most successful of this strange sub-genre thanks to the voice work of Michael J. Fox, Sally Field, and Dom Ameche. Two dogs, the golden retriever Shadow (voiced by Ameche) and the pitbull Chance (voiced by Fox) are joined by Sassy the cat (Field), together the three of them journey from a ranch across the country to reunite with their family following a simple miscommunication between humans. Again, I have to stress, none of the animals actually talk, we don’t see their lips move to mimic speech like Mr. Ed, oh no, all we get is voice-overs.
Have you tried to watch this movie lately? First off, it’s still incredibly charming, but with an adult’s eyes, you can see the different ways it was edited to make us think all three were on screen together. I can only imagine that Sassy and Chance had beef similar to Julianna Margulies and Archie Panjabi on The Good Wife. Secondly, that ending. We never see Shadow get out of the pit after his friends leave him to die. Who thought that was an okay thing to do to kids!? Yeah, he comes bounding up and is part of the inevitable sequel movie, but seriously Hollywood executives, why did you have to traumatize millennials?
The Many Other Animal Movies Of The 90s
Before Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey, there was 1989’s The Adventures of Milo & Otis. A Japanese film about Milo, an orange cat with a single brain cell, and Otis, a pug, who find each other lost in the wilderness and become fast friends. The English version is narrated by Dudley Moore, doing the voices for every animal, which, again, is something you simply can’t imagine in a feature film today. Well that, and the allegations of animal cruelty on the set of the film make it hard to watch today. Yet, this movie was so popular, I remember my mom being proud of herself for finding it at the local rental store one weekend.
While both of those films pretended to have animals talk in their own way, another massive 1993 hit didn’t even bother with that. Free Willy is first off, surprisingly darker than you remember. Orphans were all the rage in children’s entertainment for easy sympathy points. This time, 12-year-old Jesse feels trapped in his foster home and bonds with an orca doomed to be killed by Michael Ironside for insurance money. The climax of the movie is on the poster. It takes nearly two hours of orphans, social services, and evil businessmen to end on a shot that has lost all of its power thanks to social media.
Free Willy was a massive success, and four years later, so was Air Bud, the movie that is the punchline on every podcast hosted by 40-somethings. Air Bud was, again, as you’re seeing a pattern form, a dark story about a kid dealing with the death of his father when he realizes there’s nothing in the rulebook about a dog playing basketball. This somehow spawned a massive direct-to-video franchise. If Air Bud was released today, my friend’s 10-year-old son would make a TikTok mocking its plot holes.
There was Dunston Checks In, Babe, Monkey Trouble, Beethoven, all of them were of mixed quality (Babe and Beethoven are classics and no one can tell me otherwise). They might as well be from another planet. Today’s kids have a love for liminal spaces, YouTube horror shorts, and whatever is going on with The Amazing Digital Circus. I can’t imagine them sitting and watching Homeward Bound. Then again, I was a kid when it came out, and now as a 40ish adult, it’s hard to remember how it felt when Beethoven pulled down that deck.
Every generation has a movie genre that somehow became popular, from the beach movies of the 60s, the monkey movies of the 70s, the copious amounts of cocaine that powered everything in the 80s, and in the 90s, we had our animal movies. Try and explain them to a kid under-10 today, and try not to feel like you’re losing your mind while doing so.
