A Cat in Paris

plays in Celestial Cinema Saturday

plays with Tribute to James Marsden

(France, 2010, 70 mins)

Screenwriters: Alain Gagnol, Jacques-Remy Girerd
Producer: Jacques-Remy Girerd
Exectutive Producer: Emmanuel Bernard

Rated: PG

No one has ever seen an animated feature-length film done in this style before, hand-drawn with flat, richly colored surfaces and a low-gravity fluidity. Very—Picasso meets Matisse and makes a grand cartoon.

"A Cat in Paris is a wonderful antidote for the mass-produced computer animation constantly dumped into multiplexes," said The Epoch Times and suggested that Toulouse Lautrec must have phoned in some contributions.

No matter which great Parisian artist you invoke, the look of this film is perfectly suited to a story full of high-flying whimsy about capers on the rooftops of Paris, a lonely little girl, and a skillful thief who wants to see that justice gets done.

Pulling all this together is Dino, a fire-striped cat-of-all-cats, not a talking toy but a true feline, silent, stealthy, and totally attuned. Dino lives two lives, one with the girl and another with the burglar. These two lives begin to interweave under the influence of a bad gangster and a good cop who happens to be the little girl's mother.

Le Monde, which would be Dino's home-town newspaper, appreciated the way this film captures Paris as a mythical landscape and said, "With its graceful fluidity and feline swiftness, A Cat in Paris is a symphony of music and colors!" It's an Academy Award nominee.


- PW

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