It's hard to tell if this was meant to be a family film or only for kids. It's too complex for the little children, too stupidly uncool for maturing children, while adults would have to be awfully enamored of the idea of talking animals to care for it. And I must admit, the whole talking animals thingy does amuse me.
After the live-action/animation breakthroughs on the two films about the pig Babe, I really expected Babe's commercial success to induce a slug of talking animal films, since once the computer program was written for animating the lips, seems like that could've been recycled endlessly along an assembly line of similar pictures. I expected to see remakes of The Jungle Book, Francis the Talking Mule, Mister Ed: The Movie, a live-action rather than cartoon version of The Wind in the Willows & Lady & the Tramp. But apart from two so-so Dr. Doolittle films, Good Boy! about a talking dog from outer space learning to be properly subserviant to man like a proper dog, a dream-sequence in Snow Dogs, & a shitload of talking animals on television commercials, the theaters haven't yet been blitzed with this sort of thing.
And so far nothing apart from Babe & Babe, Pig in the City has been particularly watchable, & certainly not half so good as the edgy science fiction comedy A Boy & His Dog made long before there was a computer program to make that intelligant mongrel's mouth move.
After seeing Cats & Dogs one can see how it could become all very tiresome very fast & just a few films of this ilk is still too many. Cats & Dogs is like a very funny seven-minute episode of a Pinky & the Brain cartoon stretched out to an intolerable feature length. The persian cat who wants to take over the world is identical to the mouse The Brain, & his fawning low-IQ sidekick tabby is the same as Pinky. Except that the cartoon mice are more convincing.
According to this film all are evil, having always only pretended to like the humans they live among, while plotting our doom. Dogs however really are "man's best friend." They are all that stands between us & the cats' conquest of the earth. Not only do cats & dogs talk to one another in English when humans aren't around to hear them, but they have an elaborate advanced spy technology which the cats use for evil, & the dogs use for good.
Clearly someone who attended a beginner screenwriting workshop doesn't like cats. In the morning paper there's a story about a pitbull that bit off the face of a four year old girl, but this movie posits all cats are either evil or stupid or both, & all dogs are clever & good. The script is rarely convincing, & the head cat always talking like Doctor Evil while the dogs worry & fret about the safety of mankind mostly just seemed stupid. And I found myself liking the cats way better than the nambypamby dogs anyway, because the cats were funnier. The dogs were so dour, you'd think they just came home from seeing The Plague Dogs & were rethinking this whole man's best friend business.
For all its stupidity, it's nevertheless totally cutesy & diverting, & never sufficiently convincing that the children are at risk of hating cats afterward.
copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl
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