Symbolism In The Secret Life Of Pets

Just like Mark Twain wrote children’s books with a deep, underlying societal message to influence kids and imprint them with said message, Illumination writers do the same type of imprinting on kids. The only thing is that the kids don’t know about it. In The Secret Life of Pets the main racial message is black pain and suffering.
Max, the main character, makes the black characters suffer through his ignorance and personal triumph. Max is to be inducted into a gang of sewer pets, led by a white bunny named Snowball played by Kevin Hart, by taking a snakebite in the butt with his new friend Duke. Max gets scared and kicks a rock which coincidently causes the snake’s death. The snake dying causes a huge commotion among the sewer gang because the snake played a big role in their lives. The scene contributes to the message of how white people always get what they want even if it is at the expense of a life and loss of a prominent symbol in one’s life. During the Brooklyn bridge scene, Snowball goes and saves Duke and Max, but the scene completely overlooks that a coloured person saved a white person. The scene focuses more on the triumph of the white people not dying. There is actually a part where Snowball is resting on a floating chunk of asphalt and saying a few lines. The whole situation is overshadowed by comedy. The message hidden by the
Johnson mostly focuses on the fact that Snowball is a “sloppy black militant allegory” and his “Flushed Pets movement” is led by a bunch of thrown away pets with the motto of “Revolution forever, domestication never.” He also mentions that when Snowball starts talking to Duke and Max they switch into a black vernacular which made Johnson cringe. This symbolizes the almost innate racism white people have in mocking the way a black person