It’s an uncommon crime thriller that makes room for whimsy, but A Cat in Paris, France’s recent Oscar-nominated animated feature, suffuses its story of gangsters and thieves with a playfulness as nimble as the feline after which it’s named.
The story really centers around the cat’s owner, a young girl named Zoe, and Zoe’s mother Jeanne, a police inspector in pursuit of two criminals: Victor Costa, the gangster who murdered her husband, and Nico, a burglar prowling the rooftops of Paris with graceful parkour. Jeanne struggles to balance her investigations with the needs of her daughter Zoe, who hasn’t spoken since her father’s death. The synopsis sounds grisly, but the film doesn’t dwell on the drama.
Dino, the titular cat, helpfully ties together the story’s disparate threads: by day, he brings Zoe dead lizards and lounges around the family’s apartment; by night he accompanies Nico in his thievery, a literal cat burglar. When Zoe follows Dino on a midnight stroll, worlds inevitably collide.
Nico, of course, is a thief with a heart of gold; he steals without qualm but helpfully arranges the plants on his victims’ windowsill, and immediately takes a liking to Zoe.
Zoe and Jeanne may be the main characters, but the film’s strengths all converge in Nico: even the film’s look, a rough expressionist animation that’s popular on the shorts circuit but rarely appears in feature films—a storybook Picasso—seems designed for his exploits. It’s fluid and expressive, and it allows Nico to twist into impressive knots as he sneaks in and out of windowsills, all snaking limbs and liquid anatomy. The style also suits his rooftop view of Paris: a riot of colorful, cramped apartments and countless rows of jagged chimneys.
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