Your thoughts on the unintentional pathos of dog acting make me think, weirdly, of pornography I’ve seen — not at all to equate human and dog bodies, but to point out how untenably fragile the illusion of “pleasure” can be when it’s all too clear that what’s happening on screen is less about some freely willed performance than the churning of a heartless industrial engine.

I was disturbed enough by this gap between preferred diegetic reality and inferred profilmic reality to ask my wife whether the dogs in Space Buddies struck her as being freaked out. She assured me the dogs would be panting if they were scared or tired … but it didn’t completely put my worries to rest.

You’re right. Dogs can’t unionise. You don’t need to pay them repeat fees or a cut of the grosses. They’ll work for scale and/or Mutt Mix. I said this on my own comments page, but I’m all for recycling, and it seems pertinent here: My problem with dog movies is that dogs are just terrible actors (with the notable and unfair exception of Gromit). Whenever they’re asked to portray any kind of emotional state (running the gamut from cute to worried via defensive or confused), I don’t see the performance – all I see is a dum labrador eyeing up the scooby snacks that are being dangled in front of them just out of shot. Either that, or you can tell that they’re desperate to stop reshooting that “hilarious” skateboard scene; in those cases, I always assume there’s some kind of cattle-prod or other instrument of coercion just off camera. Invariably, talking movie dogs are supposed to convey “sassy,” when all I can see in their eyes is “hungry.”

But I like your idea that dogs (and other animals) are intermediate test cases (hey, we experiment on them to test shampoos and airbags, so why not this?) for digital performance enhancement. “Man’s best friend”? More like “man’s cheapest proxy”. Puppetising animals has been Disney’s stock-in-trade for decades, and I can’t help wondering if it has cumulatively helped us to antropomorphise animals for real. You like to think you have an empathetic bond with your dog, when really you’re just the guy who knows how to work a tin opener. OK, that’s a bit cynical. Maybe I’m not qualified to comment on a bunch of movies I’m deliberately avoiding…