polished, yet silly and pointless Cars. And you have smaller, apparently independent European movies like this one. Bravo!Contact me with Questions, Comments or Suggestions ryitfork @ bitmail.ch

not the only friend this kitty has got. Soon, a mysterious stranger will enter their lives, and together they will face a dangerous task...However, the real eye candy of "Une Vie De Chat" was the animation and the atmosphere it delivered. Drawn in an almost naive manner, the characters, surrounding and overall visual expression was truly beautiful and mysterious in a very special way. Seeing this anime is quite a different experience than you'd expect from a cartoon and it fits all ages, both kids and adults. It reminded me quite some of "Amelie", with a unique visual description of Paris and it's unforgettable charm.I like to be pleasantly surprised, and "Une Vie De Chat" is by all means the best surprise I could get. There is still some soul and creativity left in the European animation. It's a must-see for all true fans of anime. Good job!

burglar and protect an art exhibition. Zoe hasn't spoken since her dad died and is cared for by a nanny named Claudine.The first twist to the plot is that Dino has a double life-Zoe's cat by day, companion to the cat burglar, Nico, by night. There are some magnificent scenes showing Nico and Dino pulling off a heist and escaping. The visuals are incredible in these night scenes. Dino the cat weaves the various plot lines together as the several characters and story lines start to intertwine themselves. I won't discuss any more major plot points because it is, after all, a mystery.There is a running gag of sorts involving Dino and his penchant for stirring up a small yappy little dog named Rufus. It's funny and entertaining, as Rufus can be annoying but has lots of determination and stamina! This film is available on DVD and Blu Ray. It looks beautiful on either format. Most recommended.

Tarantino, but the bereaved Jeanne's battles with the cartoon-Costa of her imagination put a quiver in my stiff upper lip. And the clambering up and down the face of Notre-Dame is a pure paean to Paris... and to the Hunchback! There are two apparently separate stories going at the start: the little girl with a workaholic single mother, plus the night-time adventures of her cat. But neither of them is quite what it seems -- the neglectful mother in particular is a much more sympathetic character than we initially assume -- and both strands rapidly intertwine with a gangster thriller plot. This may be an animated adventure, but it has more than enough depth for adults as well as children: in fact, I suspect the tension may be a little too much for small children. One little boy in the row in front of me had to be carried out howling that he wanted to go home.The style of animation is -- deliberately -- extremely crude: characters are drawn in the simplest of outlines, although I noticed that the cat movement and postures, for all the crudity of the shapes, were extremely well done. Take the scene, for example, when the cat is sprawled in Nico's room -- or when it disdainfully opens just one slit of an eye as Claudine rages at it! And almost all the action takes place at night or by artificial lighting, heightening the child's storybook appearance of the art. This is clearly a consciously retro aesthetic: I was amused to note that the brand of paper used in making all the drawings got its own entry in the credit listing at the end of the film.What really grated on me, for some reason, was the depiction of the feet I had the same problem with DreamWorks' Sinbad animation . The characters in this film have incredibly tiny triangular feet which seem always to be drawn from the same angle no matter which way the rest of the body is pointing, and I found it visually disturbing to have the perspective so obviously all wrong...A bonus feature was the fluent idiomatic English translation in the subtitles, at least in the London Film Festival version: it makes a welcome change from translations obviously aimed at the American market. And it's always fun to back-translate the insults: within the limits of my vocabulary of French vituperation, some pretty apt equivalents seemed to have been chosen! I'm tempted to rate this at 9 out of ten, but I don't think it has quite enough depth for that level: I'll compromise and knock a point off for the annoyance of the feet, leaving it at a very solid 8.

to end.While this film is clearly aimed to kids, I think that the adults will find "A cat in Paris" to be quite enjoyable, mostly because it is a way more mature and sober movie for the family viewing.

with the best being the title character, a strutting observant sort of cat, and the little girl who is sweet and moving, and the voice acting is dynamic enough too. In conclusion, a very good film. 8/10 Bethany Cox