In the new feature from French animators Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol, A Cat in Paris, the titular feline is Dino, a black-and-scarlet tomcat with a double life. By day, he lives as the affectionate companion of Zoe (Lauren Weintraub), a taciturn little girl who dwells in a Parisian flat with her police detective mother, Jeanne (Marcia Gay Harden) and housekeeper Claudine (Anjelica Huston). When the sun goes down, however, Dino slinks through the city with Nico (Steve Blum), a suave burglar who apparently filches the from the City of Lights's safes for his own amusement. It's a charmed life for Dino, but complications arise for all parties involved when Jeanne and fellow detective Lucas (Matthew Modine) begin to track Nico's activities, while also closing in on a loathsome crime lord named Victor Costa (JB Blanc). Costa, naturally, is the villain who slew Jeanne's husband and Zoe's father, and it comes as no surprise when all of these characters eventually collide, led by the enigmatic cat. The result is a series of comic misadventures and frightening perils, culminating in the inevitable confrontation atop Notre Dame's buttresses.
Given that A Cat in Paris was one of two dark horse foreign films nominated for this year's Academy Award for Best Animated Feature—along with the Latin jazz love poem Chico and Rita—it's disappointing that the film is so humdrum in its narrative ambitions and so emotionally limp. Feature-length animation isn't required to fulfill such needs, of course: The artistic liberation offered by the medium allows stylish design and fleeting comedic delights to sustain a work in a manner that live-action rarely permits. And, whatever the storytelling faults of A Cat in Paris—renamed, pointlessly, from its French title Une Vie de Chat (A Cat’s Life)—the film is a visual confection, rendered in jewel-tone lines and velvety shapes that suggest the colored pencil illustrations of a bed-time storybook. The character designs are a pleasure to behold: Dino's self-satisfied animal charm is precisely rendered, while the humans (especially the black-clad Nico) evoke the fine-meets-pop art flavor of French comic book figures.
Such aesthetic delights do not, however, entirely compensate for the trite story, complete with distractingly pat conclusion, or for the faintly disengaged, shallow quality to film's demeanor. That Dino is more of a plot element than a character is at least understandable—he is a cat, after all, and retains a certain feline aloofness—but the human characters never register as anything more than hollow archetypes, no thanks to the colorless English voice-acting (excepting Blanc's agreeably oily scenery-chewing). Only the film's beguiling look salvages A Cat in Paris from such story missteps. One can envision a delightful 15-minute trifle emerging from the film's ingredients, but Felicioli and Gagnol have miscalculated by preparing an unfulfilling 70-minute meal.
