Headscratchers / Animal Crackers (2017)

• If Horatio has multiple PhDs, why did he go into the circus business?
  • They could be PhDs in drama and theatre studies, which actually do exist. Having said that, there's a legitimate question as to why he didn't go into, say, acting or theatre direction, rather than the circus business - I can only presume his resentment of his brother was what was anchoring him to it.
• I'm confused about the timeline. There is a 7 year skip between young Owen meeting Zoe at the circus and Owen and Zoe being married adults moving into their new home. There's also maybe another 7 year skip in that middle period, unless that's just the first time skip being mentioned again? In that time, none of the circus performers appear to have aged much (though Esmeralda is gone, and Chesterfield looks older due to having gained weight), yet Horatio looks like he's aged about 40-50 years. What happened?
  • Chesterfield mentions 30 years passing after Horatio leaves the circus. That's ample time for Horatio to have aged, and for some circus members to have come and gone. The performers aren't all the same in the past and the present. Also, Chesterfield really did age in that time. So did Bullet-Man.
  • However, the first scene of Owen in the dog biscuit factory (after proposing to Zoe) shows a montage of Owen eating the biscuits, and there is a caption saying "Seven Years Later", and then another one a few seconds later saying "Seven Long Years Later." It's still hard to tell if these are meant to be the same time skip or not.
  • Presumably it's the same seven years, because Owen and Zoe don't look fourteen years older in the modern day than they did when he proposed.
• Why didn't (or why couldn't?) Bob and Talia speak in their dog and cat forms up until the climax?
• Did nobody at the circus (especially Chesterfield, who knew how the animal crackers worked) really know that Ol' Blue and Zena were Bob and Talia? Why didn't someone tell Owen and save him a lot of grief?

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