There may still be a soft ban on the importing cultural products from Russia into the UK while the war rages on in Ukraine, but someone has let this one in under the wire. Produced by a Moscow-based production company called Licensing Brands (a fabulously utilitarian name worthy of the Stalinist era), Cats in the Museum is an animated feature that delivers just what its own title suggests. There are some cats, and they are in a museum. Book your ticket now because what else is there to take small children to see in the holidays if you’re not sure they can cope with The Boy and the Heron or Godzilla Minus One?
The film’s feline-featured player is an orange tom (voiced in the English dub by Jordan Worsley) who doesn’t even have a name when he is washed ashore on a desert island well before he gets to the museum of the title. There he only has a painting of a lady and a cat that looks like a Modigliani knockoff for company until a mouse named Maurice (Stephen Krisel) shows up, befriends him and names him Vincent after Van Gogh.
Maurice likes to eat paintings, and has such a refined palate that he can tell just by taste which ones are masterpieces and which are fakes. A series of strange events finds the unlikely pals ending up at the Hermitage where Vincent meets a clowder of oddly civic-minded cats who live full-time in the museum, protecting the precious art from mice such as Maurice. Clearly, this film was made by someone who has never met a cat because if they had they would know that pack behaviour and the protection of property hold no interest for your average moggie.
Further museum-based mayhem is caused by a blue-coloured ghost cat with a Scottish accent (Michael Kleeman) who can enter the paintings on the wall; this gives the film a chance to big up the Hermitage’s collection, which Russian films with funding from the ministry of culture are often keen to crow about.
The whole thing plays like a cross between James Mayhew’s Katie books, about a girl who jumps into paintings, and Russian Ark, Aleksandr Sokurov’s single-shot tour of the Hermitage. The animated art sequences are reasonably entertaining but show how ropey the rest of the film’s visuals are. On a cat-by-cat basis, the character animation is OK, better at least than the script which leaves the one female character, an Abyssinian-looking ingenue named Cleopatra, with almost nothing to do but simper at Vincent throughout the film.
• Cats in the Museum is released in UK and Irish cinemas on 26 December
