Your dog will always want to eat what you're eating - well, most usually, anyway, especially if it's not *good* for the dog particularly. Thank goodness, of course, this short from Disney (which won, deservedly I might hope, the Oscar for best animated short), doesn't show the aftermath of eating such things for a dog. But it's not really about that per-say, though of course if you have a dog you'll recognize it immediately as being accurate. What it's about is how a dog relates to its master, and what the filmmakers get so brilliantly in six minutes is how a dog can learn if it's put into the position to observe and react and feel its master's behavior.
So at the start of this, for the first minute or so, we're just seeing how the dog loves to eat - the junkier, the better, and god help him (or her?) when it comes time to the super-bowl - but then after this, we know just from the food that things have changed. The man is eating healthier because of the girl, so the dog gets less portions and more things like, uh, soy crisps or whatever. But then the girlfriend leaves this man, and he goes into over-eating depression mode. The dog is just happy to eat... until it sinks in the master is definitely *not* happy. This must be rectified. So off to find the ex-girlfriend...
Of course things are simplified into a quickness, but it's the sort of wonderful, compact, to-the-point and yet with a lot of depth and heart quickness that one has seen in other things produced by John Lassiter (though not to the same depth, I was reminded of the break-neck pace of life as the opening of Up had, how quickly life can move). And of course the dog itself is probably TOO cute, and I don't mean to say that as if to pinch the dog's cheeks, it's like they make the dog programmed to be that way... as if from a computer! At any rate, Feast is all about the love of food, but the love for humans that trumps it. It actually takes time to make the background as important as the foreground. Emotional effects/affects are really what's at stake here, not so much what the dog gets into its belly, which is what makes it so great for kids and adults - maybe adults more-so - as it plays to just making that right connection as an adult or as a kid.
