Every Dog's Guide to Complete Home Safety
1986 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Les Drew
Genres: animation, comedy, family
Wally, an earnest professional safety dog, is assigned to a home where an infant's parents overlook basic hazards. A rapid series of accidents and near-misses tests Wally as he delivers more than forty home-safety tips.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a PSA wearing a cartoon dog suit, which should be unbearable, but the sheer commitment to absurdist safety-lecture as narrative structure—forty tips crammed into ten minutes of controlled chaos—has a deadpan perversity that almost works.
A formally rigorous exercise in the educational animation lineage, where the constraint of delivering forty discrete safety lessons becomes the film's organizing principle rather than its limitation; the pacing and structural discipline here recalls the best of mid-century instructional craft.
The decision to make the dog not a cute mascot but an increasingly frantic professional trying to prevent slapstick disasters—a performance choice that reframes the whole thing as dark comedy rather than earnest instruction—is what elevates this from generic PSA to something genuinely strange and small-budget alive.