Film Reviews

The Cat Returns

• Rating:
• Director: Hiroyuki Morita
• Starring: Cary Elwes
• Details: Japan / 75 mins (U).

Unaware that the cat she saves from being run over in traffic is a prince in the Kingdom of Cats, young Japanese schoolgirl Mura (Hathaway) finds herself overwhelmed by a largely useless series of gifts from 'the incredibly magnificent' Cat King (Curry) that culminates in an unrefusable offer of marriage to Prince Lune (Andrew Bevis). With the help of The Baron (Elwes) and Muta (Peter Boyle) at the Cat Bureau, Mura makes her way to the Cat Kingdom to sort things out. Once there, however, Mura begins to turn into a cat herself; worse, the Cat King is a homicidal maniac.
An unusually gentle Manga-style animated feature, The Cat Returns is a contemporary update of the Alice in Wonderland story, with just a smidge of The Wizard of Oz thrown in to keep things ticking over. The animation isn't up to the inventive standard offered by Pixar or Disney in recent times - actually, there's something endearingly quaint in the naivety of the drawing - but there's still plenty of ironic and post-modern moments to keep the adults amused, most of them courtesy of the bonkers Cat King and The Baron's fat-cat side-kick Muta, and the central message - be true to who you are and all will work out fine - isn't at all a bad one for impressionable kids to absorb.

Review by Declan Burke