An Unlikely Pair on an Incredible Journey

Over the years my family has amassed a large collection of movies, many of them taped off of television. Unfortunately, our collection has grown too large at times for us to contain it. In such instances, many of the taped movies are weeded out and disposed of. Unfortunately, one such spring cleaning effort went a little overboard, and many movies we did not intend to rid ourselves of were tossed out by mistake. When thinking of the movies that fell victim to that great tidying effort, my brother Nathan recounts this particular movie as one of the most grievous losses.

The Adventures of Milo and Otis is a bittersweet tale that recounts the coming of age of a pair of unlikely friends: an orange tabby cat named Milo and a pug named Otis. The two meet on the farm where they are born, and the mischief-making feline is constantly getting the stoic pug into trouble. The movie begins with a series of humorous misadventures which the puppy and kitten have at home.

The mood turns more serious when Milo is swept away while playing on a boat in the stream and is carried far away from his home. Otis follows hot on the kitten's trail, but the world is larger than either of them can imagine and each time the two are reunited, something comes along to drive them apart once more.

A series of difficult trials see Milo and Otis through childhood, and the movie ends with them reunited once more, this time with families of their own. As the friends set off to brings their families back to their roots, we see the story come full circle. It is a bittersweet moment, for Milo and Otis' childhoods were all too brief. But now a new generation has arrived to begin its own adventures.

The cinematography here is wonderful, with lots of great shots of animals in all sorts of situations, ranging from the humorous to the desperate. I almost think that the movie would have been better as a picture book of sorts; that is, no talking. Let the action tell the story. Dudley Moore's narration gave the movie a nice storybook quality, but I found it rather annoying in the context of an actual movie for all of the characters to be played by one person. It's annoying enough on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. I guess the only place where I've found that technique to be entirely successful was in Disney's The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met.

It's a fairly short movie, clocking in at only an hour and fifteen minutes, and while I wouldn't give it the highest marks for characterization, it's a cozy film about growing up and finding friends in unlikely places.