A Dog’s Way Home

Thank you Sony Pictures for sending us this 96-minute Blu-Ray to review!

We get sent quite a few pet-themed movies and A Dog’s Way Home is a live-action movie with the main dog's thoughts being narrated throughout. A Dog’s Way Home begins with a young pit bull puppy being born under an abandoned house. Along with the puppy’s siblings are a bunch of cats and kittens. That is, until animal control arrives and takes away most of the animals. The young puppy is separated from her mother and is fed and raised by a motherly cat instead. A kind young man that lives across the street stops by and feeds the cats. During one of his visits with his friend, Olivia, he meets the puppy and gives her a home.

The puppy is named Bella and enjoys playing with Lucas and comforting his mom, who suffers from PTSD. She also enjoys games such as “stop” and “don’t chew shoes.” The voice narration by Bryce Dallas Howard is really well done and quite entertaining. For a short while, things go well, and Lucas and his mom successfully manage to hide her from their landlord, who does not allow pets. Thankfully, the landlord announces his visits so Lucas can sneak her into work on those days. However, hiding a pit bull in a VA center is no simple task.

Other challenges arise when Lucas gets on the bad side of animal control; Denver, Colorado, is not tolerant of pit bulls, and threatens to euthanize her if caught. In an attempt to keep Bella safe, she is put in the care of Olivia’s family, who lives four hundred miles away in New Mexico. Bella’s stay there is short-lived as she is determined to “go home” as it’s one of the tricks that Lucas taught her.

This trick takes a couple of years to complete. It’s a tough journey as Bella has several brushes with death and makes some unusual friends along the way. Bella meets an orphaned cougar and becomes her mother. Although Bella is a live-action dog, the cougar is obviously computer animated.

Bella also gets some temporary human caretakers like a married homosexual couple that put a rainbow collar on her. Although they treat her well, she belongs with Lucas and parts ways with them. In the end, Bella does find Lucas and Olivia who have started living together in her absence. They didn’t flash wedding rings around like the other couple did so I’m not sure if they were married or not. One other thing worth mentioning is the blaspheming with the term OMG used in its full form.

In the end, A Dog’s Way Home is a heartwarming story and the kids and I enjoyed watching it together. One of them even cried at the end. If you like narrated pet movies and/or pit bulls, A Dog’s Way Home won’t disappoint.

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