This film from Scottish animators Will Anderson and Ainslie Henderson might have been a straightforward piece about Anderson’s mother being diagnosed with mouth cancer and his coming to terms with her getting sick. But instead, it begins with Anderson in front of the camera admitting to his mum (recovered, thankfully) that after five years of off-and-on work, the film feels like a failure. “It’s all a bit of a mess,” he says, voice cracking with emotion. What he is going to do, Anderson tells his mum, is show her some of what he’s been working on. So, the film turns into a scrappy documentary with flashes of originality and some interesting things to say about the form itself.
When Anderson gets the call from his mum – “it’s the C-word” – he’s having a bit of a moment professionally. The lo-fi animations he creates with Henderson are generating industry buzz. We watch a clip of his mum chuckling along to one of them: a stick-drawn gull talking about eating a “Glasgow salad” (that would be chips). Around the time his mum gets ill, Anderson creates Dom (voiced by Tobias Feltus), a gloomy black cat with a portly tummy that lives in the corner of his laptop screen dispensing niggling home truths. “You are a coward,” he tells Anderson. “You hide behind your work. You don’t spend any time with your family.”
A more slickly packaged film might have tidied this into a sweet, reassuring narrative about a family coming together. I get the feeling Anderson is a bit of a brooder; he picks at the documentary he has failed to make like you would a scab. He seems uncomfortable with the artifice of it, showing how they recreated scenes from real-life for the camera. These meta moments make A Cat Called Dom a formally interesting film, though add to the unfinished feel and the sense that this is a film reaching for a meaning.
• A Cat Called Dom is released on 22 September in UK cinemas.
