REVIEW: A Cat in Paris Captures the Mystery of the Feline Heart with Gorgeous Animation
If you could distill essence de chat into a few well-chosen pen strokes, you?d end up with something like Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol?s superb animated adventure A Cat in Paris, a picture whose modest demeanor only underscores how expressive and imaginative it is. This isn?t the kind of big-budget animation we get from the major studios: It?s richness of another sort, a feat of hand-drawn animation that relies on spare but succinct character design and a dazzling sense of perspective — rather than a volley of cultural in-jokes — to tell its story. The picture sparkles, but in the nighttime way — its charms have a noirish gleam.
Most of the picture does, in fact, take place at night, beginning and ending with the nocturnal Parisian perambulations of a wily striped cat named Dino. Dino ?belongs? to a little girl named Zoe. He pledges his devotion by bringing her little gifts from his nighttime hunting jaunts. Actually, he keeps bringing her the same gift: One dangly, limp dead lizard after another, but Zoe is delighted by them and saves them all in a little box, much to the annoyance of her new nanny.
What almost no one knows is that Dino doesn?t go out at night just for fun, or simply out of a feline sense of duty. He?s also a cat burglar, assisting a sneaky but noble local jewel thief, Nico, on his midnight rounds. The plot becomes more complicated — to the extent that it?s complicated at all — by the fact that Zoe?s mother, Jeanne, is a detective with the Paris police. She?s consumed with concern for Zoe, who hasn?t spoken since her father was killed by a square-shouldered, square-headed thug named Victor Costa. She?s also riven with grief, and she?s determined to…
Coco Lee Connie Nielsen Cristina Dumitru Daisy Fuentes Dania Ramirez Danica Patrick Daniella Alonso Danneel Harris