The rules for the movie show that the domestic animals can talk to each other, but the wild ones don't. The humans can't hear what they're saying or thinking. The sequel did the same thing.
The story contradicts itself in several areas:
1.) The family is temporarily moving to San Francisco because the mom got married to a guy who got a job relocation. And yet at the end of the movie, the family doesn't appear to be living in the city at all, despite the scene where the oldest brother goes to the police station. Instead, they all look like they're living in a large, 5-bedroom house in a forested area in some place like Maine or the upper Midwest. The closest equivalent you're gonna find in that part of the Bay Area are the houses rich people up in Marin County live in, not the city proper. If the family truly was living in SF, they should have been living in a really nice row house.
2.) The dialogue doesn't state whether the family was actually staying there, or just hanging out for a while, and the animals were just staying at the college friend's ranch until the family moved back, wherever that was.
3.) If the family was going to move to San Francisco, and they needed someone to take care of their pets until they found a home that would allow pets (such as a privately owned SF rowhouse or townhouse), they would have had someone in the city proper to care for the animals, not some rancher living almost an entire state away.
Basically, the entire script was engineered so that the animals would be forced to go on a journey through the Sierra Nevada Mountains to go looking for their family.
reply
share