The Academy Award for Best Animated Feature was introduced in 2001, and throughout its brief history, it’s mostly been a mechanism through which to honor whatever Pixar does every year.
Yet the act of choosing nominees from the very shallow pool of feature-length animated movies has resulted in some encouraging side effects. Sometimes the nominees are a bit of a stretch — we’re looking at you, Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius — but the Oscar spotlight has occasionally given a lift to relative obscurities like Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist and The Triplets of Belleville; or Persepolis, an adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s vivid graphic memoir of growing up Iranian.
Last year’s category gave two such curiosities a theatrical boost: First, Spain’s Chico & Rita, a vibrant musical set against the backdrops of several major cities in the late ’40s and early ’50s, and now France’s A Cat in Paris, an hourlong trifle that likely wouldn’t have seen American theaters otherwise. An argument could certainly be made for the film as a pleasing divertissement, but as an Oscar nominee? Let’s just say that the producers were fortunate that Pixar whiffed with Cars 2.
Directors Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol, working from a script by Gagnol and Jacques-Remy Girerd, give A Cat in Paris a lovely handcrafted appeal, full of angular faces, slightly off-center buildings and enchanting rooftop views of the city at night.
But they don’t spend much time languishing in atmosphere, because there’s an overplotted adventure that needs constant tending, and they’ve only given themselves 65 minutes to resolve it. (The theatrical release adds an extra three minutes with a one-joke short, “Extinction of the Saber-toothed Housecat,” that somehow feels padded by 120 seconds or so.)