Hotel For Dogs Review

Hotel For Dogs feels like a film from a more innocent time. The children are inventive, curious and compassionate. The humour contains no snide asides to adult chaperones, but most importantly the dogs don't talk. They can do absolutely everything else - steal food, use a human toilet, display a range of emotions with just their eyebrows - but they can't talk. No technological wizardry is used to make their mouths move, they don't even have Danny DeVito narrate their thoughts like in Look Who's Talking Now - it's all just pure, unadulterated dog.

The French Bull Terrier, the Mastiff, the Bulldog, the Border Collie and even the Mexican Hairless are all beautifully coached by animal trainers who must find themselves increasingly short on work with all the possibilities CGI holds. Each time one of the pack that forms over the course of the movie does a well-timed wiggle, leap or bark you can imagine the buckets of bacon bits being enthusiastically referred to off camera.

Children love dogs and don't really need them to do anything as fantastical as talk to remain enamored. It's a joy in itself to see a crowd of every disparate breed imaginable - as although these dogs are strays, they're all purebreds - with a Yorkshire Terrier next to a Great Dane, a Chihuahua next to an Old English Sheepdog.

Anyone who's ever searched YouTube can't have missed the series of home movies involving 'talking dogs' - that is, dogs that say whole sentences in the shape of a whine or growl. Now that's entertainment, whereas CGI can so often be creepy when forced on an animal. Hotel For Dogs lets the animals' natural cuteness shine, playing them off against four photogenic kids, and one that looks like a mini Jonah Hill from Superbad.