Sigmund Freud theorised that children relate more to animals than to adults. He believed that their instinctual behaviour and simple emotions might be more understandable to them than the complex behaviour of a parent. Young viewers of Lassie: A New Adventure might agree with this hypothesis, as the unaltered barks of the dogs are more intelligible than the distractingly poor dubbing for the people. It wouldn't be fair to put director Hanno Olderdissen in the doghouse though, as the German production that follows Lassie Come Home (2020) has a bubbly soundtrack and a conventional family-friendly plot that reiterates the universal love for our pets.
Florian Maurer (Nico Marischka) and Lassie travel to the Italian countryside to spend the summer with his favourite Aunt Cosima (Katharina Schüttler) and her terrier, Pippa. Shortly after his arrival, the idyllic village is disturbed by a succession of missing pedigrees, snatched while retrieving balls or when waiting for their oat milk puppuccinos. Lassie and Florian seek to catch the perpetrators, with help from his new cousins: the snarky tweenager Kleo (Anna Lucia Gualano) and her overly genteel younger brother, Henri (Pelle Staacken). When Pippa goes missing, Lassie heroically offers herself up as bait.
Dogs are said to be man's best friend. Yet this Lassie seems to act more like Florian's Sat Nav than his fond companion. It feels bizarre to critique a dog's acting performance, but as the titular character of this film, the collie lacks emotion. There was nary a wet eye for her captured canines as they lay listlessly in dirty cages. Lassie immediately proceeds to escape (without a single backward glance for any other pooch!). Somehow it felt clear that she wouldn't be doing any of this without a treat. You could almost sense the necessary enticement just out of the shot.
While Eric Knight's original book and the first Lassie film were set in Yorkshire, Olderdissen's A New Adventure takes place in South Tyrol, northeast Italy. The mountainous region's lush valleys are scenic, though at times a little detached. Like footage captured by a tourist board. The set design for Cosima's home and the grand-yet-pest-infested hotel makes the places feel real and lived-in. Comedy is a neglected element of the film and when it does appear it's quite banal. There's one half-hearted fart joke and some light slapstick humour but when kids can watch a baddie get bonked on the head by a paint can in Home Alone, slipping in spilt shampoo just isn't going to cut it.
As antagonists, the dognapping duo are inexplicably tame. Even for a children's film, the Brains and Brawn trope, manifested in Lassie as the scheming girlfriend and the halfwit boyfriend, is employed cautiously. At the height of the tension, a polite-sounding fire alarm rings in a ‘just in the nick of time' moment. But even at its peak, the stakes are barely high enough to raise interest, let alone concern. Just like the dog who plays Lassie, our hearts just aren't in it. Though the story is predictable, Florian's worries about being a responsible pet owner and Kleo's insecurities, stemming from her time in foster care, add a welcome emotional weight to the plot.
The concluding moral delivered earnestly by Aunt Cosima, “When you listen to what your heart says, you're doing the right thing,” feels excessively saccharine when considering the film's target audience of iPad kids. Maybe that's too cynical, but as there's easy access to short-form content of dogs playing basketball, this 90-minute feature should have taught this old dog some new, more impressive, tricks.
Lassie: A New Adventure will be available on Home Entertainment from July 15.