Illumination Entertainment scored a huge hit in its Despicable Me franchise (which has a new installment, Minions, out this summer) but the animation studio is still looking to expand with other original films. Now, the teaser for its latest venture, The Secret Life of Pets, has arrived, providing a highly promising look at a pic with one of the best kid-friendly premises we’ve seen in quite some time (Inside Out excluded).
The pic explores the lives of several New York City pets after their owners have departed for work or school, imagining what crazy (or innocuous, in Max the Dog’s case) adventures the animals get up to. Directed by Chris Renaud (Despicable Me) and Yarrow Cheney, it looks reliant on physical comedy but also boasts a huge voice cast, including Jenny Slate, Louis C.K., Bobby Moynihan, Kevin Hart, Eric Stonestreet, Ellie Kemper, Lake Bell, Hannibal Buress and Albert Brooks.
The teaser for The Secret Life of Pets is immediately charming – as well as completely reasonable for any pet owners in the audience – so it looks like Illumination could have another runaway success on its hands (sorely needed, given how disappointing its Lorax adaptation turned out to be). Here’s the official logline:
For their fifth fully-animated feature-film collaboration, Illumination Entertainment and Universal Pictures present The Secret Life of Pets, a comedy about the lives our pets lead after we leave for work or school each day.
Neither that synopsis nor the teaser shed much light on what the exact story will be, but a good bet seems to be that the non-human residents of the central NYC tenant building find a way out and take the Big Apple by storm. Still, The Secret Life of Pets doesn’t open until July 8, 2016, so Illumination has some time to fill us in on the details.
