Family-friendly stories like Pet Puraan, 777 Charlie and Mughizh are proof that the pet story is going to become a mainstay of Indian films and TV in the years ahead.

For the last week or so I have been watching episodes of SonyLiv’s Marathi-language comedy series Pet Puraan, starring Sai Tamhankar and Lalit Prabhakar as a yuppie couple (Aditi and Atul) in Mumbai who’ve been married for almost four years now. Thanks to their families’ unyielding insistence that they have a baby pronto, the duo decides to adopt a pet instead. Aditi enjoys the company of cats while Atul has always wanted a dog; a couple of episodes in they end up adopting one of each — Baku the cat and Vyanku the dog (a young Golden Retriever), both handsome devils whose mischief-making is always excused because they’re just too darned cute.

Pet Puraan’s blend of situational comedy and gentle, feel-good social satire works very well and the animals themselves are a sheer delight. As a pet parent myself (I have a four-year-old cat named Bagheera who I adopted shortly after his birth) I found the dilemmas depicted in the show to be relatable.

And to be honest, it’s very difficult to find faults with a show as essentially good-hearted as Pet Puraan clearly is — in many scenes you can see that the actors are having a good laugh themselves at Baku and Vyanku. Their charms really are irresistible and this makes Pet Puraan a very wholesome show indeed.

It’s also, seemingly the flavour of the season. Because recently, the Kannada-language film 777 Charlie, about the unlikely bond that develops between a down-on-luck factory worker and a Labrador he befriends, was released theatrically across the country. It has proven to be a sleeper hit at the box office and has received unanimously warm reviews across the board. Indian films and shows are turning a corner, clearly, when it comes to depicting pets.

Pets in the cinematic zeitgeist

When I was growing up, in the 90s, movies involving pets (or indeed, animals in general) were having a bit of a moment in Hollywood. In 1992, the great John Hughes co-wrote the film Beethoven (directed by Brian Levant), about the eponymous St. Bernard dog who teaches the Newton family all about opening one’s home and heart to an animal. Beethoven became a big hit at the box-office, crossing a $100 million (a big deal back in the 90s) and spawning as many as seven sequels (the latest of which was released in 2014) that used the Beethoven name and a St. Bernard at the heart of the plot (but featured different human characters and setups in each).

In 1987, the Japanese film Hachiko Monogatari, about a dog named Hachiko became a worldwide sensation, eventually being remade into a Hollywood movie starring Richard Gere (2009). Hachiko was a real-life Akita hound who waited for his owner to come back from work for a full 9 years after the man’s demise. As one might expect, this was a tear-jerker for the ages and according to the NYTimes, led to a surge of interest in Akita hounds across America and the UK.

Closer home, Bollywood did have a few animal-centric films to its credit—Haathi Mere Saathi springs to mind immediately. In 2013, Professor Rachel Dwyer, one of the pre-eminent scholars of Indian cinema, wrote, “India’s famous film industry features many elephants as working animals, devotees of God, and characters who take major roles. The most famous of these is Haathi Mere Saathi (The elephants are my friends, dir. M.A. Thirumugham, 1971, Hindi), which blends many views of the elephant, as loyal animal, connected to Ganesha, who are morally superior and more loyal than human creatures. A recent film, Kumki (Captive elephant, dir. Prabhu Solomon, 2012, Tamil), shows how elephants continue to suffer at the hands of humans.”

But largely, animals and especially pets remained in the background. The Salman Khan-Madhuri Dixit starrer Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, one of the most successful Bollywood films of the 90s, featured a super-cute Pomeranian pup called Tuffy in a memorable cameo. He was part of quite a few songs in the film and at one point, ‘umpires’ an intra-family cricket match by holding up printed signs saying ‘out’, ‘four’, ‘six’ and so on after every delivery.

More recently, the Sriram Raghavan movie Andhadhun, which became a major critical and commercial success, featured an adorable tuxedo cat named Rani (the feline actor in question was actually called Mani) who belongs to film’s protagonist, a blind pianist called Akash (Ayushmann Khurana). Rani is seen climbing up the stairs to Akash’s apartment in the opening scene, even as Akash is composing a new tune on the piano.

She clambers right up near the keys, sniffing her parent’s chin when he gets stuck at a particular note. Later on in the movie, Akash tells a suspicious police inspector that Rani is a black-and-white cat, prompting the cop to ask Akash how he knew that. “Someone told me,” Akash says nonchalantly, signaling to the audience for the first time that there’s more here than meets the eye.

For films like Andhadhun, animals are inextricably tied up with the larger symbolism and mythology of the film—for example, in the scene I just described, cats are shorthand for mystery and intrigue and the fear of the unknown. On other occasions, dogs have been used as a stand-in for loyalty and trustworthiness — even in a derisive sense sometimes (remember the Ban Gaya Kutta song from Pyaar Ka Punchnama).

The new generation of onscreen pets

The last few years in Indian cinema have been unique in the sense that for the first time, the act of adopting and then caring for a pet has been centred. Look at the Tamil-language film Mughizh, for instance. This heartwarming dramedy, produced by and starring Vijay Sethupathi, was released in October last year and is now available on Netflix.

Vijay (Sethupathi) is a simple, good-hearted man who has always been very fond of dogs. He feeds the street dogs in his locality and they love him for it. It’s all very wholesome, except there’s one problem — his little daughter Kavya (played by Sreeja Sethupathi, the actor’s real-life daughter) is very afraid of dogs. Vijay and his wife Radhika (Regina Cassandra) decide that the best way to help Kavya overcome her fears is to adopt a puppy. But when the puppy is tragically killed in an accident, the entire experience ends up teaching the couple a lesson or two about loss, grieving and indeed, introducing these tricky concepts to one’s children.

Despite the somewhat grim plot details, Mughizh is very much a feel-good movie, a story about ‘bringing up one’s parents’, so to speak. Little Sreeja’s winsome performance as Kavya, as well as the many enthusiastic street dogs featured in the film, make it a must-watch for kids and parents alike.

There are certain key elements that are common to the three most recent examples of pet-centric films and shows — Pet Puraan, Mughizh and 777 Charlie.

One: they hammer home the point that adopting a pet is not just a privilege—it is a responsibility as well. This is responsible messaging, of course, and to the makers’ credit, this point is well-made in all three of the aforementioned films/shows.

Two: these stories use the human-pet relationship to make broader statements about the nature of all parenthood — although they are also careful not to stretch this beyond breaking point. This is perhaps clearest in Pet Puraan, which begins with a scene where our 30-something protagonists are gently berated by their parents for not having kids despite almost 4 years of marriage. Slowly, gradually, as Aditi and Atul learn more about the nitty-gritty of caring for a pet every day, they also learn a lot about each other’s strengths and weaknesses as co-parents; it’s suggested that the pets have made these two baby-averse people a little more likely to have kids of their own someday. Hell, they even end up becoming precisely the kind of syrupy-sweet, baby-talking pet parents they claimed to dislike at the beginning of the series.

Three, these stories are all, broadly speaking, tear-jerkers, a genre I have a soft corner for. You might have seen pictures of the Karnataka Chief Minister and a few of his cabinet members crying after a screening of 777 Charlie; several Indian celebrities across sports, Bollywood and fashion have also confessed to crying after watching the film. Somewhere along the way, amidst an explosion of chest-thumping nationalism, superheroes and period dramas, film audiences forgot how to cry at the movies, one feels.

There’s no doubt in my mind that this current trend of pet-centric films and shows will flourish in the streaming era, especially when every single network is hunting for family-friendly content. You know, stuff they can watch and re-watch with their kids, or stuff they can play in the background to keep the kids occupied while they cook or clean.

And if these movies prompt some of these kids to needle their parents into adopting a furry friend, I say amen.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels.

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