Directed by professional dork Charles Martin Smith (I’ll be goddamned if it hasn’t all been downhill for him artistically since 1986’s heavy metal horror triumph Trick or Treat), A Dog’s Way Home is, as its title would indicate, the epic story of a lovable lost pooch, Bella (voiced by actress Bryce Dallas Howard), trying to find her way home to her beloved master, Lucas (Jonah Hauer-King) – although, probably as a concession to brittle sensibilities, he is never referenced in the screenplay as Bella’s master, but only as her person. At first glance, this might only appear to be a canine’s seemingly harmless adventures through town, country, and rugged Colorado wilderness; but closer inspection reveals this effective children’s tearjerker to basically be Globohomo: The Movie.
3.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that A Dog’s Way Home is:
7. Antiwar. Physical and psychological costs of war are embodied by homeless veteran Axel (Edward James Olmos) as well as attendees of a veterans’ therapy group that includes Lucas’s mother (Ashley Judd), who suffers from depression and finds consolation in Bella’s company.
6. Pro-gay. Bella stays for a while with two gays (Motell Foster and Barry Watson), one black and one white, who serve as poster boys for homosexual parenting, the care they provide to Bella and another dog contrasting instructively with the callousness of grumpy heterosexual Mr. Kurch (Chris Bauer). “That man belongs alone,” Bella observes.
5. Pro-miscegenation. Lucas enjoys a relationship with more-or-less white-presenting mixed-race woman Olivia (Alexandra Shipp).
4. Woke and anti-white. Mean white guys include the aforementioned Mr. Kurch; unscrupulous, animal-hating landlord Gunter Beckenbauer (Brian Markinson); and nerdy, ineffectual dog catcher Chuck (John Cassini). Olivia and Lucas’s mother provide girls with role models as strong, assertive womyn effecting social justice by standing up to insensitive white men – in Olivia’s case, by livestreaming a scene of injustice.
3. Multicultural. Bella was raised by a cat and later adopts a young cougar as her traveling companion, demonstrating how characters from different backgrounds can live peacefully with each other and learn to work together.
2. Anti-gun. Bella witnesses hunters killing a cougar, leaving its cub a defenseless orphan.
1.Pro-immigration. A Dog’s Way Home arrives just in time for the muh-poor-brown-kids-in-concentration-camp-cages melodrama. A Denver city ordinance makes Bella’s breed illegal, so that “a dog can be banned from the city because of how it looks”, to which Olivia objects: “That’s basically racism for dogs!” It is easy, therefore, to find in the movie’s depiction of Animal Control officers stand-ins for totalitarian ICE agents out to net Mexican or Guatemalan kids, lock them up, and make them cry just for the hell of it. Fortunately, Animal Control is unable to enforce local law when Bella finds sanctuary at a veterans’ hospital, which, it is argued, constitutes federal jurisdiction. Sheriff Arpaio BTFO happily ever after. Rather revealingly – but no doubt unintentionally – A Dog’s Way Home also illustrates what illegals ultimately represent to virtue-signaling white progressives – their cute little pets.
Rainer Chlodwig von K.
Rainer is the author of the books Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism and Protocols of the Elders of Zanuck: Psychological Warfare and Filth at the Movies.