Esoteric Happy Ending: Charlie is allowed to go back to Earth and live out a considerable lifespan with Sasha and David. All well and good, except that Heaven's monotony and starched, sniffy, oppressive nature was driving Charlie to the brink of madness. He's been granted a brief, happy reprieve — then back to an eternity of misery. The only upside is that he'll live on Earth with Sasha for a few years, and then the two will ascend to the afterlife together, along with reacquainting with Itchy. The TV series alleviates this a little by showing Charlie getting around this by taking duties on Earth as a guardian angel, and no longer an outcast in Heaven by the end of the series.
Harsher in Hindsight: Both Itchy and Carface ascending to the different halves of the afterlife is more poignant now that Dom De Luise and Ernest Borgnine are no longer with us. Charlie's goodbye scene with Itchy in particular has a sad tint knowing not just Charlie Sheen but all three of Charlie's voice actors throughout the franchise would outlive De Luise.
Crash Bandicoot creators noted that Neo Cortex being Demoted to Dragon for Aku Aku'sEvil Twin Uka Uka was inspired by Carface's dynamic with Red in this film. This would take an even more amusing similarity in the TV series, where Carface is Demoted to Dragon again, this time for Annabelle's evil twin, Belladonna.
Magnificent Bastard: Red is a delightfully devilish demon with designs to upheave the current status of the spiritual realm. A clever trickster who fooled Carface into signing over his soul, Red uses him to steal Gabriel's Horn from Heaven, and even when the initial theft is bungled, Red adapts and quickly turns Charlie and Itchy into his pawns with a kind disguise and charming words. After his machinations land Gabriel's Horn in his waiting paws, Red nearly succeeds in his plan to use it in dragging all dogs down from Heaven and straight into Hell, leaving it a "cat's world, now!" Thoroughly showing Carface exactly how a true villain should operate, Red is a truly felonious feline who masterminds the whole film simply because "it feels so good to be bad."
Memetic Mutation: An odd example, as it involves the movie, rather than being spawned from the movie, but in 2020, people kept editing the Wikipedia page for the movie so it mentioned Gordon Freeman's death.Explanation In the series, Benrey edits a Wikipedia article to say that Gordon is dead. Since Gordon has no Wikipedia article, he arbitrarily added this fact to the page for this very movie.
Moral Event Horizon: Red crosses it with his plan to send all the dogs in Heaven down to Hell.
Popular with Furries: Charlie and especially Sasha are popular characters amongst furries. Sasha is the reason this film tends to be preferred to the original amongst furries.
"During the "I Will Always Be With You" segment, Charlie and Sasha can be seen gazing towards the sunset atop what we can only assume to be the Golden Gate Bridge; notice that the actual span of the bridge for whatever reason is not there.
Most of the designs of the human characters, mainly those in the background, are a noticeable step down from the original film's semi-realistic look. Hard to believe David Feiss was the supervising animator and character designer, as the designs might remind you of the cartoons he created.
There are plenty of instances of animations overlapping each other improperly if one looks hard enough, especially during the fast-paced segments.
During the chase inside the police station, the officer who got knocked out between the double doors disappears in a few frames before we see him again lying down completely dazed once more after David outwits the cops.
A lot of the backgrounds suffer as well. Although they certainly give the film a look unique at first, they often look too much like the paintings they are, thus very little looks solid and three-dimensional as the characters interact with the cityscape around them.
Much like the series, there are a lot of implied politics between Heaven, Hell, and Earth, little of which is explored. Where are the souls of the dogs who can't get into Heaven when Gabriel's Horn is missing? Are they in some kind of purgatory (seriously, dog purgatory sounds fascinating) or just stuck outside the literal gates (Anabelle's dialogue seems to imply the latter)?
Gabriel's Horn, despite its implied awesome powers and dangers of it falling into the wrong hands, is just a MacGuffin here and isn't shown to do much more than open things at will. What exactly is Red using it for other than Fantastic Racism? Sending them to Hell? Or some other dimension of divine punishment?
The fact that Charlie doesn't so much as mention Anne Marie, let alone run into her as an older woman, considering how much of the previous movie was about him falling in (platonic) love with her. However, at least part of this can be forgiven since her voice actress was killed before the original film even came out.
For that matter, the movie barely touches upon the emotional impact of Charlie coming back to life six decades after his death and the effect this would have on him.
," a classic '90s power ballad, especially the reprise that plays over the credits.