10 dog and cat movies we recommend, and what we notice that you probably do not
We posted a top ten of dog movies on Instagram this week, and a caption is a caption: ten lines, ten films, done. This is the longer version, with the things we actually talk about when a film comes up during a walk.
Because we watch these differently now. Once you spend your days on the other end of a leash, you stop watching the plot and start watching the dog: how it was cued, whether that tail is really happy, which breed got cast for looks rather than temperament. Some films hold up beautifully under that gaze. One or two get complicated. And a few of them changed real dogs' lives in ways nobody intended, including here in South Florida.
Cats get their own section further down, because they earned it.
The ten
1. Lassie Come Home (1943). The one that started the genre, and it opens with a piece of trivia that tells you everything about animal casting: Lassie is a female character, and Lassie was played by a male dog. Pal was originally hired as a stunt double for a female collie. He was so good in the flood scene on the San Joaquin River that the studio let the original dog go, hired Pal instead, and reshot the first six weeks of filming. Every Lassie for decades afterward descended from him.
2. Old Yeller (1957). Still the benchmark for "films that ruin children," and we mean that with respect. The dog who played Yeller was called Spike, a floppy eared mastiff and Labrador mix picked out of a shelter in Van Nuys, California, and trained by Frank Weatherwax. A shelter dog carried one of the most famous performances in American film. Keep that in mind when you get to the Dalmatian section below.
3. 101 Dalmatians (1961). The most beautiful film on this list and the most consequential, and not in a good way. More on it below, because it deserves its own heading.
4. Beethoven (1992). Pure comfort food, and honest about one thing most family films skip: a giant breed in a normal house is a logistics problem. According to the American Film Institute's catalog, the adult Beethoven was a two year old purebred Saint Bernard named Chris, backed by eight stunt doubles and sixteen puppies of assorted sizes to cover him growing up. If you have ever wondered why the dog looks slightly different between scenes, now you know.
5. Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey (1993). A remake of The Incredible Journey (1963), and the only film on the dog list with a proper cat in it: Sassy, a Himalayan, voiced by Sally Field, opposite Don Ameche as Shadow and Michael J. Fox as Chance. The animals who did the work were Ben, Rattler and Tiki. Watch the interspecies choreography, it is genuinely hard to stage.
6. My Dog Skip (2000). A quiet one, and our pick if you want a dog film that does not devastate the room. Skip was played mainly by a Jack Russell terrier named Enzo, whose father, Moose, played Eddie on Frasier from the first season; Enzo took over that role from the eighth. So this is a family business. One footnote for accuracy: the real Skip in Willie Morris's memoir was a smooth fox terrier, not a Jack Russell.
7. Marley & Me (2008). The most honest film here about what the first two years with a big adolescent Labrador actually look like. Twenty two Labradors played Marley across his life, with a dog named Clyde carrying the adult scenes and a calmer dog named Jonah handling anything that required stillness. Eight trainers worked the production under Larry Madrid. It takes a lot of very good dogs to portray one very bad one.
8. Hachi: A Dog's Tale (2009). The American remake of the Japanese Hachiko Monogatari (1987), directed by Lasse Hallstrom. The real Hachiko was an Akita born in November 1923. His owner, Professor Hidesaburo Ueno, died in May 1925, and the dog kept returning to Shibuya Station until his own death in March 1935, which is close to ten years of waiting. The film softens almost nothing. Do not start it after a hard day.
9. A Dog's Purpose (2017). Also directed by Hallstrom, and the one film on this list we cannot recommend without a footnote, so here it is honestly. In January 2017 a video from the set showed a German Shepherd named Hercules being handled into churning water. American Humane pulled its on set representative, and Universal and Amblin cancelled the Los Angeles premiere and the press junket. An investigation commissioned by American Humane concluded in February that the video had been deliberately edited to mislead and that no animals were harmed in those scenes, while also stating that the handling in the first scene should have been gentler and signs of stress recognised earlier. PETA disputed the findings. We are not in a position to settle that, and we would rather you know it than not.
10. The Art of Racing in the Rain (2019). A golden retriever named Enzo narrates his own life in Kevin Costner's voice, which sounds unbearable and mostly is not. Different Enzo from My Dog Skip, incidentally; this one is named after Enzo Ferrari.
Five for the cat people
Cat films are rarer and stranger, because a cat cannot be directed. It can only be predicted.
Kedi (2016). A documentary by Ceyda Torun about the street cats of Istanbul and the people who quietly feed them. No plot, no narrator telling you how to feel, just cats living exactly as they choose in a city that has decided to let them. If you only watch one thing on this whole page, watch this one.
A Street Cat Named Bob (2016). Bob, the real ginger cat, is credited as himself and appears in nearly every scene he was capable of doing; six ginger stand ins handled the stunts, the bus jumps and the running. James Bowen has said the director expanded Bob's role after the cat improvised a moment on camera. Bob died in June 2020, around fourteen years old, after being hit by a car.
Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961). "Cat" is the best supporting performance in the film and won a PATSY award in 1962, the animal industry's Oscar of the era. One correction to the legend: Orangey was less a cat than a stage name. The trainer, Frank Inn, said several ginger tabbies worked under it.
Inside Llewyn Davis (2013). A cat named Ulysses becomes the plot. The Coens deliberately cast an orange tabby because the colour is common enough that several cats could share the role, then picked which cat did which scene based on what each one was naturally inclined to do. That is the whole secret of filming cats, and it is also good advice for living with one.
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022). Animated, and the best film about mortality anyone made that year. The wolf is genuinely frightening. Watch it with your cat sitting on the remote.
The part that is not entertainment: what a movie does to a breed
This is the piece we most want you to take away, and it is why 101 Dalmatians has its own paragraph.
A 2014 study in PLOS ONE by Ghirlanda, Acerbi and Herzog, "Dog Movie Stars and Dog Breed Popularity," found that a successful dog film is followed by a rise in that breed's registrations lasting up to ten years, with the size of the effect tracking the film's opening weekend audience. The top ten films in their sample accounted for more than eight hundred thousand extra registrations over a decade. The biggest single effect belonged to The Incredible Journey, the 1963 original of number five on our list.
Dalmatians are the cautionary tale. Following the 1985 re release of the animated film, American Kennel Club registrations climbed from 8,170 a year to 42,816 by 1993, and then collapsed by 97 percent over the following decade, which the researcher Hal Herzog describes as the steepest decline of any breed in AKC history. After the live action film in 1996, local reporting documented what that looked like on the ground: in 1997 shelters in Dade and Broward counties reported Dalmatian returns up as much as 35 percent, with some shelters seeing surrendered numbers more than double.
That happened here. Not in a study, in South Florida shelters, to dogs bought by people who had watched a film about how charming they are and had not been told that a Dalmatian is a high energy working breed that needs a job.
So enjoy the films. Just do not let one pick your dog. If a movie makes you fall for a breed, the useful next step is meeting three adults of that breed at the least glamorous hour of their day, ideally in August in Florida. If you are not sure what that means in practice, our summer walking guide is the unromantic version.
And if you want the ending that suits this list best: the dog in Old Yeller came out of a shelter.
What to watch when, in one line each
- Kids in the room, nobody cries: My Dog Skip, Beethoven, Homeward Bound.
- Kids in the room, everyone cries, and it is worth it: Old Yeller, but plan the conversation afterwards.
- You want to be wrecked on purpose: Hachi, Marley & Me, in that order, with a gap.
- You want to watch animals be themselves: Kedi, Inside Llewyn Davis.
- You just got a puppy and need to feel seen: Marley & Me, first hour only.
A note on "no animals were harmed"
That line at the end of the credits is a certification from American Humane, awarded when its representatives monitor a production. It is not a law and it is not a guarantee: the organisation monitors a subset of productions, and, as the 2017 case above shows, its own oversight can end up under examination. It is a signal worth reading, not a promise.
FAQ
What is the best dog movie to watch with young children?
My Dog Skip, Beethoven or Homeward Bound. All three have real emotional stakes without the ending that keeps parents answering questions at bedtime.
Which dog movie is the saddest?
Hachi: A Dog's Tale, and it is not close. It is based on a real Akita who returned to Shibuya Station for close to ten years after his owner died.
Are there good movies about cats?
Yes, and the best of them is a documentary: Kedi, about the street cats of Istanbul. A Street Cat Named Bob features the real Bob playing himself in most of his scenes.
How many dogs played Marley in Marley & Me?
Twenty two Labradors across the film, with one dog carrying most of the adult scenes and a calmer dog used for anything that needed stillness.
Was Lassie really played by a male dog?
Yes. Pal, a male rough collie, was hired as a stunt double and then replaced the original female collie in the lead, and the first six weeks of Lassie Come Home were reshot with him.
Do movies really change which dog breeds people buy?
Yes. A 2014 study in PLOS ONE found breed registrations rise for up to ten years after a popular film, and Dalmatian registrations in the United States rose from about 8,000 a year to nearly 43,000 before falling 97 percent over the next decade.
Should I choose a breed because of a film?
No. Meet several adult dogs of that breed first, on an ordinary day, and ask a rescue or a breed club what the hard parts are. Films show the charm and skip the exercise requirement.
Film details in this article come from published sources, including the American Film Institute catalog, contemporary reporting and the studies cited above. We recommend these films as viewers, not as anyone's partner: nobody involved with them has any connection to dogoboca.
