A Cat in Paris: a whimsical children’s action thriller film paying homage to Alfred Hitchcock

Alain Gagnol and Jean-Loup Felicioli, “Une Vie de Chat / A Cat in Paris” (2010)

Some kitties are happy to spend their hours traipsing from one household to the next getting free feeds but here’s a pussy that lives two of its nine lives in parallel: by day it’s a little girl’s companion and by night it roams the roof-tops of inner-city Paris with a cat burglar! Yes, in this slim animated family film, the cat Dino leads a double life straddling both sides of the law as accomplice to abseiling thief Nico and beloved pet of Zoe, a lonely child traumatised by the death of her police officer father. Her mother Jeanne, a police superintendent, is on the trail of the killer Costa. Little does Jeanne suspect that the nanny Claudine she hires to care for Zoe is in fact in league with Costa and his team of hapless gangsters who themselves are part of a team of workers moving a priceless museum antique known as the Colossus of Nairobi which Costa wants for his own collection.

The film starts a bit slowly but gets going once Zoe decides to follow Dino on his nocturnal rounds and she falls into the clutches of Costa and his thugs very quickly. Dino and Nico rescue the child but Costa’s determined pursuit of Zoe draws everyone into a continuous action thriller plot that ranges through the streets and across the roofs of Paris, culminating in a stand-off involving Costa, Nico and Jeanne at the Notre Dame Cathedral in sequences that pay homage to Alfred Hitchcock films like “To Catch A Thief” and “Vertigo”.

The film is most notable for its animation style that harks back to surrealist and minimalist modern art styles used in the 1950s when animation cels were painted. Characters look a bit crude but there are moments in the film where the surrealism is effective, especially in those scenes where lights are blacked out and one character puts on night goggles. The plot is a Hitchcockian story that features a McGuffin object (the Colossus) and two characters who may be in search of love and who are brought together in the most unexpected way. I’m not sure that the plot is all that suitable for children to watch: it is quite violent in parts (the running gag with the barking dog is funny but unnecessary) and for all his bluster Costa is a very sinister and malevolent figure. His henchmen on the other hand are clowns and buffoons, and one gets the impression that the film is trying to satisfy too many expectations and audiences and is failing at achieving any of its ambitions. Few of the characters are at all convincing and they are very one-dimensional.

In all, this is a very pleasant film which could have been a major children’s animation classic but falls far short. The film could have done with another half hour to flesh out its characters and develop the plot into something a bit more realistic while still remaining whimsical.