A Dog’s Way Home Parent Guide

Bella (voiced by Bryce Dallas Howard) is a young puppy, growing up with her mother and a pack of cats in the ruins of an old home. When Animal Control tries to clean out the space, Bella’s mother is taken, and Bella falls into the care of one of the cats. That is, until Lucas (Jonah Hauer-King) and Olivia (Alexandra Shipp) come by to feed the cats, and Bella decides that it’s time to find a new home with Lucas. Bella grows up to be a large dog and she and Lucas are very happy - until Animal Control returns to tell them that since Bella is a pit bull, she won’t be allowed in the city and will be euthanized if she is found off Lucas’s property. To save Bella from this dire fate, Lucas sends her to stay with friends in New Mexico temporarily until he can move to a safer location, but Bella can’t wait for Lucas to come back. She sets off on a grand adventure to find her way home and meets all kinds of strange animals and people on the way: some friendly, some dangerous, and some in between.

Frankly, there isn’t too much I can say about this movie that you can’t intuit from a plot synopsis or the trailer. It is one of those films that is exactly what you’d expect it to be, and nothing more. There are no surprising twists or dramatic revelations: The characters are the typical “bad” or “good” guys with few shades of grey, and the plot follows a pretty standard formula for a lost animal movie. I don’t know what else you’d expect from a director whose credits include “Air Bud” and both “Dolphin Tale” movies. It’s a safe, sentimental, paint-by-numbers family picture with strong appeal for children and animal lovers.

There’s not much for parents to be concerned about here. There is almost no objectionable content of any kind, and all but the youngest and most sensitive children should be able to handle the moderate peril and brief violence in the film. Adults and older teens may be bored by the insipid story, but hey, if I can make it through, so can you. Luckily, the dog is cute and engaging, so that helps. As far as the production values go, the film is pretty bland. The script is highly predictable and the music either sounds like the royalty-free stuff available online, or, even worse, cheesy covers of rock classics. There are a few uses of CGI (some more justified than others: you don’t really want your canine star play-wrestling with a live cougar) and they all look distinctly out of place.

This isn’t to say that A Dog’s Way Home is a bad movie. It isn’t a good movie either. It’s just a harmless movie that will be enjoyed by its target audience and tolerated by everyone else.