Animation as a medium can be a wonderful and often
beautiful way to tell a story. It’s a shame that more filmmakers don’t use it. Here
in the United States animation tends to be thought of as a children’s medium
and it is generally used solely for such. Feature film animation was the
exclusive purview of Disney until the late 1990s when Pixar (acquired by
Disney) and DreamWorks started producing their own imaginative, though still
childish, films.
However, in recent years we’ve been seeing brilliant work
from foreign filmmakers who specialize in animation being recognized here and
almost every year since the inception of the Animated Feature Oscar, a foreign
film with adult oriented themes has been nominated. There’s been the dark
earth-toned work of Sylvain Chomet in The
Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist, the Iranian film Persepolis,
Waltz with Bashir from Israel. Two
years ago a little known (in the USA) Irish film called The Secret of Kells made the Academy’s cut and received a
nomination. This year they’ve gone outside the box again – the exclusion of
Pixar’s Cars 2 – and nominated two
films, one of which has not yet been released in the United States.
A Cat in Paris
from France has not yet received a commercial release more than what was necessary
to qualify it for Oscar contention. It’s directed by Jean-Loup Felicioli and
Alain Gagnol from a screenplay by Gagnol and Jacques-Rémy Girerd. The film is not
entirely adult themed, it’s probably suitable for older children with its
elements of suspense and threats to a small girl named Zoé. It is noirish in
nature, incorporating subtle hints of gangster films (I caught references to
both Goodfellas and Reservoir Dogs) and Hitchcock, but never
goes too dark. Perhaps the best thing about it is its trim 64 minute running
time that manages to cram in a decent little story of a jewel thief, a little
girl whose father was murdered sometime in the recent past, the crime lord
responsible and a ubiquitous cat that saves the day more than once.
Zoé doesn’t speak, a kind of annoying plot contrivance written
into the story so that at a crucial moment she’s unable to explain to her
mother Jeanne, a police detective searching for her husband’s killer, who the
bad guy is. Zoé’s cat goes out every night to its other owner, Nico, a jewel
thief who scurries along the Paris rooftops to break into museums and such to
acquire his loot. The city of Paris is rendered in simple line drawings that
put the buildings at odd angles to one another giving it a sinister look that
reminded me of The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari. With high angle shots that show the Arc de Triomphe and the
Eiffel Tower we know this is Paris, but at street level it’s not recognizable
as the City of Lights, but as a place where danger is afoot around every
corner.
The plot employs one of the (literally) biggest MacGuffins
in film history – a gigantic museum-bound statue of the Colossus of Nairobi.
The crime boss Victor Costa wants it for himself (I’m not sure how he plans to
steal it or where he plans to hide it). He even uses the criminal codename “Colossus”
on the job, an unsubtle metaphor for how Jeanne thinks of him. She has dreams
of him as a creature with far-reaching tentacles that choke the life out of
her. This is the kind of inventive and unique storytelling you don’t tend to
find in animated films intended for small children. It gives the film more
depth, both in terms of story and character.
A Cat in Paris
is a sweet little example that we don’t need overblown computer animation and
trumped up action sequences to tell a decent story with animated characters.
These characters are hand drawn and have just as much life to them as what you’ll
find in a Pixar film. For that alone, I suggest that it’s worth seeking out.
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