(Illumination Entertainment and Universal Pictures)

You can’t breathe on Mars. A rabbit can’t drive a bus. These are among the realities that one must blissfully ignore to enjoy the art of cartoons. The best animated features immerse you in a world that seems so real that it makes perfect sense for animals to talk and drive cars and carry on great adventures under the completely unwitting noses of their supposed human superiors.

The Secret Life of Pets starts from the promising idea that the domesticated creatures dependent on us for home and affection carry on their own lives while we aren’t around. Unfortunately for moviegoers (though perhaps wish fulfillment for animal lovers), the film is best in those rare moments when the pets’ owners are present.

Max (voiced by Louis C.K.) is a terrier devoted to his owner Katie (Ellie Kemper), who rescued him from a box of free puppies on a sidewalk. They live in an old New York apartment building whose residents own a variety of pets. When Katie leaves home, Max is content to wait diligently for her return, but other animals in the neighborhood are more restless, including a dachshund that enjoys a massage from its owner’s kitchen mixer. When Katie brings home Duke (Eric Stonestreet), a rescued pet that towers over Max, they becomes rivals. They are forced to join forces when their dog walker loses them and they fall into an underworld of abandoned animals led by the wisecracking, vengeful rabbit Snowball (Kevin Hart).

The movie is set in a glossy version of Manhattan that is inauspiciously announced on the soundtrack by Taylor Swift’s “Welcome to New York.” Now, even fans of Swift like myself may find her imagined city representative of the increasingly homogenous banality that now inhabits a once vital and distinctive town.

A sanitized New York is nothing unusual even in live action films, but the world outside the pets’ apartment buildings seems unconvincing, and when the standard-issue evil dog catchers come into the picture, the movie begins to feel like an inferior retread of last year’s Shaun the Sheep Movie, which created a far more convincing world of farm animals let loose in the city (and not coincidentally, benefited from a script that had no dialogue—and no celebrity voice talent).

Directors Yarrow Cheney and Chris Renaud (Despicable Me) set most of the film in a world where humans seem ignorant of their very existence, but the movie is most touching in the relationships between man and human—the rival dogs really begin to develop their friendship when Max helps Duke find his previous owner. There is class crisis bubbling under the movie between privileged and abandoned animals, but the characters never resonate enough for this to come through. I didn’t mind sitting through The Secret Life of Pets, but it just made me want to fetch the Shaun the Sheep Movie again.

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The Secret Life of Pets
Directed by Yarrow Cheney and Chris Renaud
Written by Cinco Paul, Ken Daurio, and Brian Lynch
With the voices of Louis C.K., Eric Stonestreet, Kevin Hart
Rated PG for action and some rude humor
90 minutes
Opens today at a multiplex near you.