Strays was made with live dogs

Strays has just had its opening weekend and made a bit more than $10 million at the global box office, which is really not an impressive figure, especially not considering the production budget that is rumoured to be around $50 million.

Something that has become a bit of a talking point about the film is whether the dogs in the film are live animals or whether director Josh Greenbaum did like so many others in the industry and used CGI for his pooches. The answer is that the dogs are real. He wanted to make a film that was as realistic as possible, well as realistic as it can be with talking dogs, but the only time they were replaced by computer-generated characters was when filming something that didn't feel good or safe for the animals.

In an interview with Collider, the director says he first filmed the dogs and then added the speech. In Greenbaum's own words:

"We kind of shot it all without the voices, which is interesting. I also would say 95% of what you just watched is all real dogs, which was really important to me. Obviously, any time it was unsafe for a dog to do anything, it was like, Alright, we're gonna go full CG, but for me, I really wanted to make sure at the start that you just felt that you were watching real dogs. Obviously, we had to have them talking since we were unable to train the dogs to talk, but I thought about it, and we could've gone full CG."

He also revealed that he has looked at what others have done and is impressed with how Disney has made the digital animals in Lady and the Tramp and The Lion King look like they are in a real environment, but as a dog owner himself, he felt that both he and other people with dogs would too easily see the difference and switch off if it didn't feel believable:

"This is right around the time Lady and the Tramp—which, if anyone saw that, it was really well done—it was all CG dogs, and Lion King, and all those kinds of amazing films came out. But I kept feeling like I've had dogs my whole life, and I'm sure lots of people in this room have dogs. You could put an elephant up in a film, and I'd be like, "Yeah, that's pretty good," because I'm around an elephant for, like, five minutes a year at the zoo when I take my kids there, but I think for dogs, I know dogs, we all know dogs. We live with them, their behaviors and mannerisms, and I just wanted them to feel as real as possible because the more real it felt, the funnier it gets, right?"

Working with animals is not much different from working with humans, according to Greenbaum, although it is of course more difficult to tell an animal than a human how you want it, but in the end it's all about eliciting emotions, and he gives the example of Will Ferrell's dog character, Reggie, confronting his former master. How it took many attempts before it looked like the dog was actually scared of Doug. It was mainly about getting the dog to walk as if it was scared. First walking up to the house, slightly nervous and then confronting him. The variety of body language. You can't just tell the dog to walk but sometimes it needs to walk slowly, sometimes fast, maybe hanging its head when it's sad or jumping when it's happy. The dog trainers have done a great job getting all the characters to act realistically in each situation.