I was quite surprised to find that Twitter may have gone a bit overboard with its praise...
I have a complicated relationship with animation. I find it a fascinating art form, but I get bored with overly standardized American productions, arty animation, and Japanese animation. This leaves me with only a few things I truly enjoy. The descriptions I read about this film caught my interest: a movie without dialogue, featuring non-anthropomorphic animals, not too "arty" since it’s released during holidays and is performing well, and with an original visual approach—all things I like.
And those qualities are all there. It’s a lovely adventure with a true love for animals, making it delightful and fascinating if you’re an animal lover. The visuals are strong—I’m not a fan of the perpetually floating virtual camera and prefer a more grounded approach, but the mix of realistic nature and stylized yet authentic animals is brilliantly done. It’s beautiful, creating both connection and distance, with a distinct style and a few standout "art book" shots that are impressive. Whether by choice or necessity, there’s no over-the-top spectacle at every moment; it’s confident in its major visual choices, and rightly so.
However, there are still issues, and it’s worth mentioning them as they are integral to the film.
First, there’s a story problem. The film doesn’t quite have enough substance to sustain its 1h25 runtime. Some sequences lack imagination, there’s a lot of time spent on the boat, and while it aims to avoid traditional "adventure" plots and still keep things happening, I couldn’t help but feel it didn’t quite manage to create a story that fully supported these intentions.
This issue makes it feel more like a short film or a video game. As a short film, it would be the standout animation short of the year, winning every festival award, a César, and an Oscar, and being showcased on Arte—and it would deserve all that. The film’s identity is great, and in 20-25 minutes, it could have distilled its essence without any fluff. It could also have been an indie game, an open-world experience that’s poetic and focused on the small-scale life of a cat in a big setting. But the thing that sets a feature film apart from these formats is the story, and this film doesn’t quite deliver on that.
On a more personal note, I was a bit fed up with how it ended as a blissful ode to "living together," a cliché of early 21st-century art that we might look back on in 50 years and find out of step with the era’s actual mindset and political outcomes. Art should reflect its time and not always be a wishful advertisement for an ideal world. This might have felt more pronounced to me given the current news when I watched it, but finishing a film focused on realistic animal interactions without anthropomorphism with a Noah’s Ark message about unity seemed a bit naïve.
Overall, though, I’ll remember having spent a beautiful moment with this film, which used the unique power of animation to bring to life something that can’t exist in written form and no camera could capture, showcasing the limitless creative potential of drawing.
