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A Cat in Paris Movie Review

A Cat in Paris is a 2010 French animated crime film directed by Alain Gagnol. It’s a weak movie that ended up being nominated for an Oscar.

It follows a young Parisian girl whose cat leads her to unravel a thrilling mystery over the course of a single evening. This is a little movie that could. It was released at the end of 2010, but it qualified for the 2011 Oscars, and it actually got nominated in a year that saw for the first time two foreign nominees in the animated feature category.

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How this came to be is beyond me. The reviews were only solid for it, but the Academy probably appreciated its old-fashioned nature. As for myself, I did like these elements, but the story overall was so mediocre that no cool aesthetic or cinematic influences of yesteryear could save it.

This is your basic crime story that we have seen so many times before. I did not particularly care for any of it. The characterization is beyond slight. The cat is memorable and the girl’s mother is also okay, but none are particularly well realized. The villains are better, but even they are walking stereotypes typical for gangster flicks.

The film consists of so many action sequences that its impact becomes muted. There are a lot of rooftop chases that are definitely visually striking, but far from suspenseful with the stakes being somewhat low. The influences here range from Hitchcock to the older French movies to even Tarantino while it is at its best when watched through the Hitchcockian lens.

A Cat in Paris is visually striking, there is no denying that. The aesthetic here is certainly difficult to define as its influences are varied, but it is very European in style and quite expressionist as well. The color palette is excellent and the comic-strip sensibilities are wonderful. Everything here is super stylized, even the action scenes and the character movements, but the character designs are only fine. The score is also very cool and the film is well paced, but admittedly its runtime of only an hour was too short.

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