Movie Review - Chestnut

We saw a cute movie this weekend called Chestnut. It came out in 2004, but we just saw it at Redb*x. The movie is rated G and it never even occurred to me to preview it. *sigh*

The plot is simple, two sisters living in an orphanage rescue a puppy (who turns out to be a Great Dane). A few days later they are adopted by a couple who live in a no-pets apartment in New York, and to make things more complicated the dad is allergic to animals. You've seen this movie before (a combo of Beethoven, Air Bud, a little Annie with Warbucks...).

Watching it from the point of view of adoption though, I started cringing. The kids live with this couple for a year in an (admittedly large) apartment, and the parents have NO CLUE that they have a dog the size of a horse. There is almost no emotional connections made between the parents and the little girls until the very end of the movie.

In the end the dog is of course discovered and the oldest girl runs away with the dog to keep him from being taken away (leaving behind her little sister). Kitty began both laughing and crying almost hysterically at this point. Then the dog was left behind in the park when the girl was found. Kitty cried even more. The dog comes home and is seriously injured by bad guys. By this point we were asking Kitty if she needed to leave the room and we gave her her evening meds early. She did make it through the movie although we could barely hear for the noise.

So thumbs up for a cute movie. Thumbs down for it's portrayal of adoption although it wasn't the worst I've ever seen - it just happened to hit all of Kitty's hot spots (animals, adoption, abandonment).