Une vie de chat

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.

I found A Cat in Paris to be a very good film. Although it is rather short, perhaps too short, it is very well animated with ethereal colours, beautiful sceneries and a fantastic atmosphere that is both thrilling and nostalgic. I agree however that how tiny the feet were drawn was a form of annoyance. The music was both haunting and charming, almost like listening to a score by Bernard Hermann. The story is not the most original story in the world, but I didn't see it as a bad thing, seeing how slickly paced, vivid, affecting and humorous A Cat in Paris was. The characters also engage, with the best being the title character, a strutting observant sort of cat, and the little girl who is sweet and moving, and the voice acting is dynamic enough too. In conclusion, a very good film. 8/10 Bethany Cox

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!

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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.