Top Cat: The Movie [Movie Review]

Now I have to admit I do have what some might say a unique taste in movies and often disagree with popular opinion. For instance, dismissing some of its occasional cringey moments, I enjoy the third entry in the Sam Raimi Spider-man trilogy and feel it’s the second strongest of the films. I prefer the third Matrix film over the first. I think ‘Signs’ by M Night Shyamalan is one of the cleverest plotted films of recent years. And I also think films like ‘The Dark Knight’ and ‘The Avengers Assemble’ were over-hyped and good, but not great.

OK, so I’m probably setting myself up for a fall here but I have to say I also enjoyed the recently released, and widely panned ‘Top Cat: The Movie’, a Mexican export re-dubbed and released over here.

The film, based on the 1960s Hanna-Barbera cartoon of the same name, tells the story of Top Cat and his gang of alley cats who are the feline equivalent of the cast of Hustle, always on the lookout for a get rich quick scheme much to the annoyance of New York cop Officer Dibble who tries to keep them in line. In this film, though, Dibble has more to worry about with shabby millionaire Strickland conning the New York police commissioner into letting him become his successor and replacing the entire police force sans Dibble with computers, CCTV cameras and robots in an attempt to become even richer thanks a series of ridiculous laws that come with their own equally ridiculous fines. It’s up to an imprisoned Top Cat and his gang, with Dibble, to stop him and reclaim New York.

Getting to see the film was an interesting journey as my first attempt to see it was cut short by a faulty film showing so it was only a week later I found another slow to see it.

I feel that ‘Top Cat: The Movie’, like other Hanna-Barbera adaptations recently (“Yogi Bear” springs to mind), has been unfairly given negative reviews by critics. Sure, the movie is not laugh out loud but it’s certainly not a tedious ninety-minutes and is a vast improvement on toons brought to the big screen like 2002’s ‘Scooby Doo’.

The film has its fair share of great humour brought about by the situations the characters get themselves into, from a selection of Family Guy-style cut-aways based on observations, to a well-timed and spot-on parody of the opening titles without Top Cat, who at this point in the film is imprisoned in ‘Dog Jail’, and many other one-liners and puns from the characters and the generic robot guards, who are given a range of personalities and quality lines. It also has its fair share of weird off-the-wall moments such as the back-story to the Anthill-Mob-style gangsters introduced late into the film and the random small police officer in Dibble’s office, alongside some nod-and-a-wink jokes aimed at the more adult audience.

For a fan of the original cartoons it’s very in keeping, with the quiet, gentle humour that perpetuates through the animation studios work. It does drop a few clangers script-wise with Strickland’s repeated emphasis of saying he’s handsome when he’s in fact pretty ugly wearing thin, a male-dominated cast with a female cat originally just there as eye candy (but does get good characterisation as the films nears its conclusion) and a potentially dodgy characterisation of an Indian sultan in the opening sting (who incidentally comes from Pikachu, surely up there with choosing the name of the creatures in film ‘Lady In The Water’ as narfs, as a misake in naming) but these are out-numbered by many other better jokes.

Officer Dibble is one character who benefits from the film with a much stronger characterisation than the original films and you certainly grow to feel for him as a character as he becomes the central focus as key parts of the film as a victim of Strickland.

The animation style has also been heavily criticised as being poor for the film. However, I would disagree as it certainly suits the original as it looks like what Hanna-Barbera cartoons would look like if they’d be done now. Mixing in cell-shaded 3D environments with flatter characters, a sort of 2DTV-style, I think it really suits the piece and though it’s not to a Pixar-level of detail the classic cartoon characters look just as they used to but brought into the CGI era and there is still plenty of detail in background visual jokes, water effects and much more. I think the style is great and distinctive and suits it. That’s not to say it’s, of course, perfect with a few inexcusable animation faults (in a scene where a character digs, a piece of rubble doesn’t move as it should) but mostly works well.

Added into the mix the voice work captures the feeling of the original with Top Cat and Benny the Ball in particular sounding like the classic characters and there is a good nod to the original with a modernised version of the opening and closing credits with a fantastic new version of the classic theme. The movie manages to balance the old and the new with the sixties feel of the original with references to modern technology and society.

Overall it’s not a film that’s going to win any awards but certainly doesn’t deserve the drubbing it has been getting in the press. With animation that mixes 2D and 3D effectively and suits the style of the original with a plotline that captures the gentle humour of the inspirational cartoon series, it’s definitely worth ninety minutes of your time to watch.

(7/10)