Cat City
(a.k.a. Macskafogó)
(1986)
Director: Bela Ternovszky
I've reviewed countless different kinds of movies for
this web site (and I have started countless reviews on this web site by
more or less saying that.) Clearly, I have a love of many different
genres, and one of those genres I like is the animated movie. I haven't
reviewed that many animated movies, and the reason for that is simple:
There aren't that many "unknown" animated movies as there are "unknown"
movies in other genres. But in the back of my mind, there has always
been a voice urging me to find and review unknown animated movies. This
voice probably comes from the influence of animation I had when I was
growing up. Part of this influence comes from animated movies, mostly
Disney movies. Snow White was probably not only the
first animated movie I saw, it was the first movie in a theater for me.
I don't remember my initial reaction to it, but I do remember feeling
superior when my mother subsequently told me she had read that when the
movie was first released, theater seats all across the U.S. had been
ruined when children, scared of the evil queen, had wet their pants. My
pants had stayed dry, and I also felt superior later when I heard that
kids my age cried when Bambi's mother was killed, and I wasn't upset in
the least when that scene came up when I watched the movie. I knew it
was just a movie. Then there was Robin Hood. One
evening, my parents took me and my siblings to the duoplex theater and
gave us a choice: Robin Hood or Chariots Of Fire.
My sister and I opted for Robin Hood - big mistake. Even
as a kid, I thought it was crummy. Not only that, we had to wait a long
time in the lobby after the movie for Chariots to end
so we could go home.
Except for Robin Hood, I enjoyed all the
Disney animated movies I saw while growing up, and they had a big
influence on shaping my present love of animation. But I wasn't just
influenced by animated movies in the theater, but also by animation I
watched on television. Saturday morning cartoons were a highlight of
each week when I was growing up. My favorite was The Bugs Bunny /
Roadrunner Show, probably because the humor was more sophisticated
and often aimed at adults. One thing bothered me about the show,
however, and that was that although I knew there were hundreds of
Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons in the Warner Brothers
catalog, the show showed the same particular cartoons over and over
again. It was years before I was able to see some "new" Bugs Bunny
cartoons. Then there was Popeye. I watched the show every week,
and it didn't take me long to notice that in every other show, Bluto
would wreck Olive Oyl's house. And I also noticed, even as a kid, that
whenever Popeye swallowed his spinach, they would show Popeye getting
strong by reusing the same animation cels in every episode. (To further
cut costs, when it came to the part of the show involving Popeye's
treasure hunt, they would show the same lengthy introduction each
time.) Then there was the Hanna-Barbera show Dinky Dog. It's
been years, but I still can't get the infectious theme song out of my
head. In fact, at the time my sister and I would drive our parents
crazy by singing the opening theme song over and over. Here's a link to the
opening of the show, but be warned - you won't be able to get that
theme song out of your head
With all of this animation influence while growing up,
what is my viewpoint of animation today? Well, I still love animation
to this day. But I have to admit that there is some animation that I am
tired of. There are all those
computer-generated animated movies in recent years where characters
SCREAM at the top of their lungs and make endless wisecracks and
pop-culture references. That's why, when I am in the mood for an
animated feature, I usually look for something different. I picked up Cat
City not that long ago,
because the way it presented itself promised that the movie would be
different than your typical American animated features. For one thing,
it was an animated movie from Hungary, the same country that made
Hugo The Hippo. Although
that movie was awful, it was at least different, so I was pretty sure I
would at least get something like that here. Here's the plot
description from the back of the video box: "It's already tough enough
being a mouse in cruel Cat City, but when the 'Cat Syndicate' starts an
all-out campaign to rub out mice forever, the situation becomes
desperate! But there is one ray of hope! A mouse scientist in the Far
East has come up with an ingenious design for a cat trap that could
save the mice forever! Can the agents at 'Intermouse' get the
top-secret plays to Cat City and save the mice? Or will the Cat
Syndicate destroy the plans and eliminate all mice forever? Everything
rests on the only mouse capable of successfully delivering the plans -
special agent Double Seven-O... Gary Gumshoe! This top-grossing
international sensation packs the best of the James Bond films into a
delightfully clever and entertaining, full-length animated feature!"
I'm pretty sure that I know one of the questions you
have in your mind about this movie, if not the prime question you have
in mind. It's one of the top questions I had in my mind when I came
across this movie and did a little research on it. That question is,
"How is the animation for this movie?" The immediate question I had
after that first question were whether the Hungarian animators on this
particular animated movies took drugs like the animators who did Hugo
The Hippo ten years earlier. Well, I'll answer that second
question first by stating that no, it doesn't look like the animators
took any drugs during the making of Cat City. And that
is kind of unfortunate. Sure, the animation of Hugo The Hippo
was insane at times, but it at least showed some (twisted) imagination.
In the case of Cat City, the animation is not up to
standards of other theatrically-released movies of the era. Much of the
animation shares traits found in animation made for television in the
United States in the 1970s. There are no bright colors popping out of
the screen; the shades of color here are dull and murky to the eye. The
backgrounds are often colored with what looks like blobs of watercolors
instead of solid colors. Also, the backgrounds are often not as
detailed as you would like them to be; in the city scenes for example,
buildings just have a few drawn lines of detail in rectangle-sized
blobs of watercolors. The movie has a pretty shabby backdrop, and it
comes across as pretty lazy even for the era.
As
for the actual animation of the movie, it isn't that much better than
the backdrops. There was one scene of animation that did impress me - a
submarine surfacing that had a surprising amount of detail - but the
rest of the animation didn't interest me as much as that brief
sequence. I could live with the movie several times using the same
animation cels over and over - this was done in a more subtle fashion
than you sometimes find in other animated works of the period - but the
rest of the animation failed to impress me. There are a number of
instances when the characters in the frame are standing completely
still and the only movement comes from panning the camera, much more
moments than even the cheapest anime from Japan. And when the
characters do move, the animation usually reminded me of the
kids' show Inspector Gadget with its not-quite fluid movements.
A deeper fault can be found with the design of the characters and
various other moving objects. Their design looks like somewhat rough
sketches done by the animators early in production. But enough of the
animation - what about the rest of the movie? I have to admit that I
would rather see a poorly-animated movie that had a good script and
memorable characters than a professionally-animated movie with poor
writing and characters. But the script of Cat City is
not exactly an accomplishment. To begin with, it doesn't seem to know
what audience it's aimed at. Much of the screenplay seems aimed at
kids, with its frequent juvenile mentality and simple-mindlessness. But
we also get stuff like a bedroom scene where you see a female mouse's
breast, plus some intense violence (a cat gets shot in the chest, and
the action-filled climax includes a shootout that in part seems
inspired by the climax of the Clint Eastwood movie The Gauntlet.)
I suppose that the filmmakers were trying to make a movie that would
have wide appeal, maybe considering it to be a "family" movie, a movie
that would have material that would entertain both kids and adults. But
adults will squirm during the movie's many childish parts, and kids
probably shouldn't be seeing many of the movie's more adult moments.
But what really sinks Cat City is how the
screenplay's various plot threads and characters have been written. To
begin with, there are a number of things introduced in the movie that
should have been seriously rewritten or simply edited out of the final
script. There's a cat that has a daughter who is shown to be friends
with a mouse, but this is forgotten about almost as soon as it's
introduced. The same cat also appears at one point with bandages for
garbled reasons. (And some of these bandages mysteriously disappear
near the end of the movie.) There's a subplot concerning a decoy for
Gary Gumshoe whose plane crashes in the jungle and he subsequently
struggles to get back home - the movie keeps cutting back to his long
slog, continuously interrupting the main plot until the very end of the
movie. As for the main plot thread - Gary Gumshoe attempting to get and
bring back the plans - it is equally poorly constructed. It takes over
half an hour before Gary leaves his home and starts his mission, it
takes about forty-five minutes for him to arrive in the Far East,
leaving around fifteen minutes for him to get the plans and bring them
back safely. If there were some thrilling adventures along the way, I
might have overlooked this. But the character of Gary is unappealing.
As he tackles his various obstacles, he makes it look so easy that
there's no excitement. The way to make a compelling protagonist is to
make his challenges difficult - seeing him struggle creates
excitement and makes the viewer want him to succeed. It doesn't help
that the movie's villains are both bland and stereotypical in their
actions and words - they are an unmemorable bunch. The whole movie's
lack of passion makes me conclude that the drugs the Hungarians took in
the past had worn off, and they made Cat City during the
period of withdrawal.
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See also: Hugo The Hippo,
Pinocchio In Outer Space, A Rat's Tale
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