Une vie de chat

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.

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.

A Cat in Paris is touching, uplifting entertainment for the young and old. The young will like it for its extreme simplicity, in contrast to many bombastic, whiplash-inducing animated films of the last decade, and the old/older will appreciate it for its beauty and sound.

Prior to its Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature, A Cat in Paris, or Une Vie De Chat, its French title, was seldom seen in America. Its animation style is gorgeous and instantly flashed me back to the big, colorful storybooks that were one of the dominant factors in my youth. The scenes look to be lifted directly from a large picture book, with its colors mixed and warm and its characters appearing like simple human-beings. I expected a watercolor style similar to Chico and Rita, another Best Animated Feature nominated from 2011, which had a heavy emphasis on character detail and environment artistry. A Cat in Paris seems more concerned with the environment and how it appears and feels as a whole, rather than the detail of it.

The film revolves around a young mute girl named Zoé, who lives with her workaholic mother named Jeanne and her black cat. Zoé feels constantly in a competition to get her mother's attention, and is in dismay when she reacts in anger to her collection of dead lizards brought home by the cat. Unknown to both Zoé and her mother is that their cat lives a double life; he assists Nico, a local jewelry burglar, in his late night heists. The cat sneaks out in the middle of the night to return home soundly the next morning and wind up in Zoé's arms. One day, Zoé, the adventurer she is, decides to sneak out and follow her cat to see where he goes, despite the cat's protest. The cat winds up leading her into a mess involving gangsters, searching for a rare, expensive statue. The result is a cute, lively cops and robbers film providing goofy laughs and delightfully whimsical material.

The jazzy soundtrack is instantly lovable, the action is in short bursts and surprisingly fluent, the animation is easy on the eyes, and the fifties look and feel is all present. A Cat in Paris is a film of low-key charm, beautifully rendered images, and a series of lovable little nuances all captured within a slender fifty-eight minute runtime. Perhaps, due to its shadowy effect and gorgeous style, you could refer to this as "animation-noir."

Voiced by: Dominique Blanc, Bruno Salomone, Jean Benguigui, Bernadette Lafont, Oriane Zani, and Bernard Bouillon. Directed by: Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol.

Having most recently been seduced by Paris in The Artist and Midnight in Paris and before that in animation with The Illusionist and Triplets of Belleville, I was fully prepared to enjoy A Cat In Paris, a nominee for Best Animated Feature Oscar, worthy of the award even with competition like Chico & Rita. I was not disappointed.

This cute, un-Pixar thriller depicts a cat accompanying a cat-burglar at night over the rooftops of Paris and into apartments ripe for the plucking with his accomplice, Nico (Bruno Salomone voice). The owner of the crafty cat, Zoe (Oriane Zani), lives with her chief of Police mother Jeanne (Dominique Blanc), both of whom are still mourning the loss of dad/husband at the hands of arch-villain Victor Costa (Jean Benguigui). The plot does not make this a memorable cartoon; it's the whimsical slit-eyed, long-nosed eccentrics who inhabit the flat pastel world, slim on speech and graceful even when they're thugs. It's a fantasy of our imagination, what we dream Paris would be like in a better world, even with burglars and mobsters.

An interesting touch is to make the cat tough rather than tender and Zoe mute for the shock of her father's death. The tonal shifts between that darkness and then silly thugs and a sweet cat burglar, who doesn't seem to be punished for his crime, will make this a problematic choice for kids, who might not get it. Parents may find it difficult to decide if this is a thriller or a comedy as well.

For me, it's just the exotic world of Paris in my imagination. Nothing beats swinging over the rooftops at anytime with anyone, even a mischievous cat.

A simple story, almost cliché, but nicely done. The story has a well done form. The execution is beautiful. You have a little bit of everything here without making a mess. I loved it. And I loved it even more after seeing the bonus track with the other versions, more dark, more violent. It succeeds at making a child movie which is fun to watch for an adult. And it can be considered an adult light story that can be seen by children as well. A wonderful depart from the big budget animations from DreamWorks and DisneyPixar. So history seems to repeat itself. You have the big budget, nicely polished, yet silly and pointless Cars. And you have smaller, apparently independent European movies like this one. Bravo!

Contact me with Questions, Comments or Suggestions ryitfork @ bitmail.ch