Une vie de chat

At 70 minutes, "A Cat in Paris" is the little film that could. The hand-drawn animated film packs a surprising amount of action and pathos into a children's cartoon and weaves a fairly rich back story that lends heft to the battle that unfolds between a cat burglar and the cat he shares with the local police chief versus the leader of a ring of art thieves. Leave it to the French to give the older child target audience some real narrative meat to chew on - although the action can be a little rough at times and some scenes will clearly scare younger viewers. The hand-drawn animation technique amplifies the scare factor but equally amplifies the warmth factor with scenes of the Dino the cat (and cat burglar)sinuously jumping from Parisian rooftop to rooftop approaching art. While the film is mostly beautiful to look at there are some plot problems such as the movie never stopping to explain how the older, puffy antagonist can keep up with our experienced cat burglar and his feline accomplice step-for-step across the Paris skyline. Also, action scenes too heavily dominate the run-time so at times it feels like Mel Gibson action movies from the 1990's. In short, the brief run time and a lack of memorable characters recommend it to a rental rather than a $12 a kid multiplex visit but it is a charming little film.

I thoroughly enjoyed this film: in one sense it's an animated spoof of a classic thriller genre, in another it's a charming entertainment -- and it contains a very well observed cat! Like the B-movies to which it nods, it packs a vast amount of action into its 65-minute running time, leavening action with humour (the splatted dog is a classic cartoon gag -- but it's a tribute to the emotional realism of the film that later on the audience was actually worried that it had come to serious harm) and parody with genuine feeling: the gangsters discussing food are a homage to Quentin Tarantino, but the bereaved Jeanne's battles with the cartoon-Costa of her imagination put a quiver in my stiff upper lip. And the clambering up and down the face of Notre-Dame is a pure paean to Paris... and to the Hunchback!

There are two apparently separate stories going at the start: the little girl with a workaholic single mother, plus the night-time adventures of her cat. But neither of them is quite what it seems -- the neglectful mother in particular is a much more sympathetic character than we initially assume -- and both strands rapidly intertwine with a gangster thriller plot. This may be an animated adventure, but it has more than enough depth for adults as well as children: in fact, I suspect the tension may be a little too much for small children. One little boy in the row in front of me had to be carried out howling that he wanted to go home.

The style of animation is -- deliberately -- extremely crude: characters are drawn in the simplest of outlines, although I noticed that the cat movement and postures, for all the crudity of the shapes, were extremely well done. (Take the scene, for example, when the cat is sprawled in Nico's room -- or when it disdainfully opens just one slit of an eye as Claudine rages at it!) And almost all the action takes place at night or by artificial lighting, heightening the child's storybook appearance of the art. This is clearly a consciously retro aesthetic: I was amused to note that the brand of paper used in making all the drawings got its own entry in the credit listing at the end of the film.

What really grated on me, for some reason, was the depiction of the feet (I had the same problem with DreamWorks' Sinbad animation). The characters in this film have incredibly tiny triangular feet which seem always to be drawn from the same angle no matter which way the rest of the body is pointing, and I found it visually disturbing to have the perspective so obviously all wrong...

A bonus feature was the fluent idiomatic English translation in the subtitles, at least in the London Film Festival version: it makes a welcome change from translations obviously aimed at the American market. (And it's always fun to back-translate the insults: within the limits of my vocabulary of French vituperation, some pretty apt equivalents seemed to have been chosen!)

I'm tempted to rate this at 9 out of ten, but I don't think it has quite enough depth for that level: I'll compromise and knock a point off for the annoyance of the feet, leaving it at a very solid 8.

Even when "A cat in Paris" isn't at the same level of animated masterpieces as "The Triplets of Belleville" or "Persepolis", certainly it is a much better film for the whole family than most of the awful stuff produced by Hollywood in the recent years.

The animation of this film is neat, with a great atmosphere and beautiful sceneries. Also, even when the character's designs seem to be quite simple at first sight, they are actually quite stylish and well made.

The story, without being spectacular, never fails to entertain, keeping a good pace from beginning to end.

While this film is clearly aimed to kids, I think that the adults will find "A cat in Paris" to be quite enjoyable, mostly because it is a way more mature and sober movie for the family viewing.

French animation has a certain stylish aesthetic. From the Gallic influenced 'Pink Panther' and 'Inspector Clouseau' cartoons to the films of Sylvain Chomet such as Belleville Rendezvous and The Illusionist, French animation has a definite look and feel. A Cat in Paris very much fits into this category. Its appeal lies almost exclusively in its French aesthetic.

Its story has three plot strands: a single mum and her daughter, their cat and a burglar and a gang of crooks. All the stories ultimately converge. In all honesty the story and characters aren't especially interesting. This is the weakness of the film. However, its strength lies in its animation and look. It's an old-style cartoon done in the traditional way. It isn't CGI and this is to its benefit. It has lots more heart and soul than the slick computer generated stuff we mainly see nowadays. The characters are simply drawn, resembling some forms of primitive art. The Paris they inhabit is beautifully presented. This city is such a knockout that it always looks terrific when animated, it really seems ideal for the treatment. Here is no exception, with the buildings lovingly depicted and the night-time rooftops romantically illustrated. The atmosphere created by the animation is very appealing.

This is a good feature. It's not up to the standard of Sylvain Chomet's work but it is certainly operating from a similar place. If you appreciate traditional animation or more specifically French animation, then this is a feature well worth catching.

A charming, if somewhat trite, tale about the night life of a pet cat, Dino, who wanders off every evening, where he leads a second life as a partner in crime for an extremely elastic burglar. During the day he accompanies the mute Zoe, having lost her will to speak after the abrupt death of her father, murdered by villainous art thief Costa. Both her parents married into the police force, so now her mother, Jeanne, places great focus on pinpointing and capturing the elusive and ruthless crook.

The odd, yet arresting, traditional animation are extremely stylish, visibly marking the specificity of French animation, seen also in similarly caricatured human drawings of Sylvain Chomein ("The Illusionist"). Drawings are kept simple, yet layered, with well animated figures, inspired by unique lack of symmetry oft found in children books, not by the strive for perfection of Walt Disney animation. Whereas the throwback-style of animation brings about a sense of unique charm, the story itself really doesn't venture into any unknown territory, instead delivering a well-mannered simple tale, which - unfortunately - does not always seem suitable for children given the simmering brutality (dogs being squashed by large bricks or a surprisingly direct level of aggression in the final act) and the drastically building tension levels in the second act. Nonetheless the entertainment value, significantly enhanced as an ode to the old-style heist genre, makes it an enjoyable affair, just as long as expectations keep the audience very close to the base ground level: just enjoy, don't analyse.

Well-paced with a decent amount of action, after a more muted, restrained beginning, the voyages of a French cat thoroughly engage, leaving a level of satisfaction, not hampered by the overall triteness and familiarity of the whole affair. Naturally, French wouldn't be French without homaging and referencing other movies, hence the feel of old Closeau and Pink Panther movies is omnipresent.