Cats (2019) [No, not that one] - Movie Review

Why do I keep doing this to myself? My habit for checking out every new film I can get to, intended audience be damned, frequently puts me in the position of acknowledging that, yes, I am actively putting money and time towards something that wasn’t made with someone like me in mind. But I happily go through with it, partly because being that open with new releases sometimes puts me in front of genuinely good films that I wouldn’t have even noticed otherwise, and partly because even if a given film is bad, it still gives me some much-needed venting and usually decent material to write about afterwards. Over the last few years, the sub-genre of animated family films about talking animals has served as one of the bigger examples of all of the worst-case scenarios listed above, and we have a particularly bad one today.

We have officially found a new low for cinematic-release animated fare, as I can’t even give this the damning-with-faint-praise of saying it looks like a glorified TV production. Rather, it kept giving me flashbacks to the animation quality found in some pet food commercials, a style that works okay in 30-second chunks but ends up dire when stretched to over 90 minutes. It’s all so sterile and lifeless, an admitted accomplishment when it’s used to show kittens flying on rockets and it still looks miserably dull.

And speaking of things I’ve seen elsewhere but done worse here, the lip-sync on the characters manages to end up looking worse than it did in last year’s The Jungle Bunch. It’s about as incredibly distracting as in that film, except this doesn’t even have the advent of decent voice talent. Not only are they in service to rather basic characters (Mac the macaw and Cape the preciously-inventive kitten are particularly annoying), the wonkiness of the lip-sync ends up neutering the delivery.

It’s basically what every animated junkie fears will happen when Eastern animation gets localised for Western audiences, with the actors showing a lot of awkward pauses mid-sentence and stilted delivery, all in an attempt to make the lip-sync slightly less out-of-place. But no, it just ends up making the whole thing even more distracting than it already is.

As for the story, while the film’s logo doesn’t make it a point of hiding what it most wants to resemble (and even when Secret Life Of Pets 2 turned out pretty sub-par, this is still worse), saying it attempts to imitate that film would honestly be giving this production too much credit. Doing that would require some level of focus and coherency, two things sorely lacking in this thing.

It makes vague appeals to environmentalism with the main cast looking for an untouched natural paradise called Peachtopia (introduced in a musical number so awful, it’s already making the other Cats movie for this year look like a fucking Dude-send), and there’s occasional moments where the material gets somewhat more mature than one would guess from the marketing. Said maturity is in the form of a cat drinking alcohol (with no dancing pink felines animation sequence added to it, lest this suddenly become interesting) and a plot point involving a furnace that only further shows that people just love taking the climactic scene in Toy Story 3 and transplanting it sans-context for the sake of cheap ‘take us seriously’ pathos. Cheap and tacky, much like the rest of the production.

This thing just sucks, plain and simple. I am genuinely struggling to think of anything about this film I could be complimentary to, and to be honest, I don’t really see the point in straining to try and lift this production above the lazy drivel it soaks itself in.