A Cat in Paris (2010)
★★½ — A Cat in Paris (2010)
There's a moment in A Cat in Paris where the eponymous feline leaps across a Parisian rooftop at night, the city spread out below in inky blues and warm amber, and it's genuinely gorgeous. For a few seconds, I felt the pull of something special. Then the plot lurched forward and I remembered we were watching a fairly thin gangster caper dressed up in very pretty clothes.
Let me be clear about what this film does well, because it does some things very well indeed. The hand-drawn animation is a joy. The watercolour aesthetic, all soft edges and moody nocturnal palettes, gives Paris a dreamlike, almost impressionistic quality that no digital tool would have produced in quite the same way. There's genuine warmth in the tactile quality of it, the sense that actual human hands laboured over every frame. The score leans hard into smoky jazz and accordion, completing a postcard-perfect Parisian atmosphere that's hard to resist on a purely sensory level. As a piece of visual craft, it commands real respect.
And the cat himself, slinking through alleyways, threading between the legs of criminals, living a double life between a daytime household and nocturnal rooftop adventures, is a genuinely appealing creation. There's something pleasingly feline about the way the film moves when it's following him.
The trouble is that everything surrounding the cat feels considerably less inspired. The story drops a young girl, her grieving mother, and a roguish cat burglar into a scheme involving a cartoonish gangster villain, and it plays out almost exactly as you'd expect from the first five minutes. Beat for beat, turn for turn. The characters are sketched about as broadly as the backgrounds behind them. Their motivations are functional rather than felt. You understand why they do what they do in the mechanical sense, the way you understand the pieces on a chess board, but you don't particularly care about any of them.
It's the equivalent of a beautifully illustrated children's picture book. Appealing in the moment, forgotten by bedtime. I've watched European animated films that use the same hand-drawn tradition to do genuinely ambitious, unsettling, strange things with storytelling. I loved Fantastic Planet (1973) for exactly that reason, and I found real emotional heft in Josep, which proves that this kind of animation can carry tremendous weight when the story demands it. A Cat in Paris doesn't demand much of itself, and that's precisely its limitation.
There's nothing actively wrong with it. It's not a bad film. It's charming in a modest, inoffensive way, and I'd happily put it on for young children on a quiet Sunday afternoon. They'll enjoy the cat, the colours, the chase sequences. They probably won't notice the paper-thin characterisation, and honestly, fair enough. That's not their job.
But when I watch animation as an adult, I'm looking for something that earns its running time, that uses the freedom of the medium to go somewhere live action wouldn't dare. This doesn't do that. It uses a beautiful visual style to tell a very ordinary story in a very ordinary way, and the gap between the quality of the craft and the ambition of the writing is where my enjoyment quietly drains away.
Two and a half stars. Pleasant, unchallenging, and very easy to forget. Hand-drawn animation absolutely deserves celebration in an age when it's increasingly rare. I just wish the celebration came attached to a story worth remembering.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2010 | Watched: 2026-04-07
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Rent: Apple TV Store · Amazon Video · Sky Store
Buy: Apple TV Store · Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Rent: Apple TV Store · Fandango At Home
Buy: Apple TV Store · Fandango At Home
Physical: Amazon US
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from France: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Letter from Siberia (1957) · Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Here and Elsewhere (1976)
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More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
