Most of the reviews will be filled with spoilers, and meant to be read after you've watched/read and formed your ideas already--not as reviews that you use to decide whether you want to pick up the book or DVD.
FIRST REVIEW-- the Animanted, adult-audience movie (R) Felidae, featuring sentient, talking pet cats. If the combination of adult and animation is odd for you, just think of, for instance, Animal Farm. Cartoons tend to be of a childish medium, but they can deliver the grit when they want to. Roger Rabbit is another good example.
1. Felidae, 1994 film, made in Germany. Based on the novel of the same name.
-This review discusses subjects that might bother people, including sex and aspects of sex. -
I’m not sure why I took such a long time to get around to
watching this movie. I think the
warnings of violence and sex were off-putting, but I’m a big girl now.
A brief note about the language—I watched the English dub,
so I don’t know if it’s fair to rate the voice actors. But for English voice actors, I found Francis’s
voice interested. It sounded geeky and
scholarly, well mannered and intelligent, yet with a raw edge of boyish,
youthful impetuousness. Bluebeard was
good as well, rough and rough yet with a brain in his skull, and Felicity was
especially enchanting. Kong was a little
bit silly, but he was animated silly too, with those thin circles around his
pupils denoting “crazy,” so maybe that’s fair. My brother watched the movie with the original German voices, and he said from what he could tell the English dub was pretty decent in matching the characters.
So now to the story, the plot of Francis as detective in the
string of murders. Francis’ role as
detective is a little startling, as he seems to have an impressive vocabulary
such as “stiffs,” and he just jumps into the role, with quips such as, “We’ll
need more information if we’re going to crack this case.” This is still believable because his owner,
Gus, is a pulp writer. Still it would be
more convincing if he had specified that Gus wrote mystery pulps. I also wish there had been a bit of
explanation of how Gus transitioned from an Egyptologist to a pulp writer.
As Francis explores his new neighborhood and neighbors with
his somewhat friend Bluebeard, the audience is introduced to a satisfying
assortment of neighbors/suspects. The
neighborhood “scumbags,” which are clearly only comic relief, and Felicity is a
charming and sympathetic creature. It is
genuinely shocking when she is killed and beheaded. The characters become more ambiguous when we
meet a cat cult who experiments with electrocution, and when Francis finds a
tape recording of a mad scientist’s video diary. It is the most chilling moment of the film
for me, as he grows progressively drunker, wilder and crueler, and the graphic
scenes of splitting skulls and seeing brains squirt out was sobering.
At the end of the recording, when Francis has had enough, he
paws the machine off. This is but one
example of cats showing high intelligence; in other scenes it’s shown that cats
can read, speak to humans if they choose, and even learn to work
computers. This was unsettling for me,
because there was no “Secret of NIMH” moment or back-story showing how the cats
gained their intelligence. I had to
conclude for myself that in this movie, it is assumed that cats are smarter
than they care to show, and the viewer must assume and accept this to
understand the story.
As any superb mystery will, the movie pulls off the act of
having the murderer being the one character you would least suspect: Pascal,
the aging and cancer-stricken scholar who has taken Francis under his paw to
guide him in learning about Felidae. The
way the twist works so well is that Pascal shares his schemes with Francis…but
only to a point. For instance, Pascal is
compiling a computer database of cat breeds in the neighborhood, so he can kill
any cat who refuses to participate in “breeding back” to their roots of a wild
cat. He shows his computer database to
Francis, but only the part where he is cataloging the neighborhood cats. He says he is doing that to “try to find the
murderer,” and he plays dumb at how the program could be used further.
As Francs begins to dialogue with him about how the grogram
could be used further, Pascal appears to be expounding and adding to the
database, but he is actually just revealing more and more of what he’s already
learned, and pretending he doesn’t know the full context of the
information. So, for instance, when
Francis suggests that they calculate what the breeds have been of all the slain
cats, Pascal does so, and remarks casually, “well, none of them came from high
breeding,” even though Pascal already knew this, since he probably marked them
to be killed because of their low race.
The movie uses great cinema tricks for showing their budding
relationship, such as one shot where Pascal is sitting on a chair and Francis
is on the floor before him, a devoted student.
Ultimately when they fight their final battle, their shadows are thrown
upon the giant portrait of Gregor Mendel, whose knowledge of genetics played a
large role in the movie.
I am doubtful that Pascal “gave” nightmares to Francis to
lead him closer to the answers. This is
a fairly science-based story, so where this mind control came from is
unexplained and weird and, frankly, not believable.
What's believable to me is how the cats’ natural behaviors are incorporated
into the story. They speak frankly of
sex, without embarrassment or any kind of coyness. This may partially come from the European
origin of the film. Bluebeard
spray-marks houses several times, and there is an overt sex scene between
Francis and an exotic Egyptian cat; the felines candidly discuss erectile
disorder, castration, sexual excitement and “sex gone too far.” The one problem this presented to me is that
if felines have such a superb sense of smell, why couldn’t Francis recognize
Pascal’s scent at the crime scenes?
It’s possible it has something to do with the medical
experiments he suffered, for Pascal was the mad scientist’s “mascot” and had
some special physical characteristic that allowed the tissue-bonding glue to
work on his skin, while burning other cats like acid.
I do wish that the cat cult had been more fleshed out. It’s unclear how Francis divined that they
worshipped the legendary Claudicas, who had been tortured to death, and though
Joker’s granddaughter knew Claudicas/Pascal was still alive, I wonder why this
was not more well-known and celebrated, instead of being a small fact that
chanced to be discovered. Overall, the
cult was more of a distraction and red herring, when it really could have been
more integrated. I also wonder why
Pascal chose to follow the footsteps of his torturer. It really seems like the opposite should have
happened. A cat, tortured by a mad
scientist, decides to go all eugenics on his cat brothers? Where does that come from? A brain-washing flashback would have been
nice.
The ending is abrupt, with a few threads left unwound. How much of a part did the “fashion designer”
cats play, and was Pascal telling the truth or goading Francis when he said
they came from natural selection, not human breeding programs? Was Pascal alone in killing the hundreds of
cats in the neighborhood, and how could so many cats have been killed without
the human authorities being alerted? What
happened to the mad scientist’s body after Pascal killed him? Why wasn’t his laboratory cleared out by the
police, his videotape collected as evidence?
Did some of those hundreds of cat bodies come from the scientist, not
Pascal?
Though I am disappointed not to get all the answers, I think
the film is somewhat deliberate in holding back. This is best shown in the one and only scene
Francis and Felicity share. Felicity intrigues
and delights, saying, “I’m not blind…I just can’t see.” She says she has been blind from birth, yet
has pictures in her mind of humans surrounded her, showing something
glittering..and then pain. Francis
divines that she has been tormented by humans who stole her sight, but Felicity
says that’s impossible because humans are so kind. Five minutes later she is dead, and her past
is never unraveled. Felidae is like
life: you are not meant to know all the answers. Be content with what you know, and use it as you
see fit.
Overall it was a satisfying story, with nod-worthy
animation—the dramatically colored backgrounds were especially lush, and I
paused once to note the thin slice of a red highlight on a lamp post. Great stuff.
I liked most of the character models, although I found Kong’s body too
bulky, over the top caricature where he looked more like a bulldog or a small
child on all fours. Felicty’s eyes were
pale green with tiny pupils, perfectly suggesting her blindness. Some of the cats, such as the Guardian of the
Dead, had long mustache-like pendulums of fur which was distracting and
overly-humanized, and all of the cat’s muzzles seemed ever so slightly
elongated, but that was probably done for speech animation ease.
As a final note the credit song by Boy George is surprisingly basic in lyrics but charming in sound. I give this movie 3/5 stars.
DVD can be found on amazon here, along with other viewer's reviews. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss/181-6309914-8596134?url=search-alias%3Dmovies-tv&field-keywords=felidae
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