talking cat film is extremely good

I live these days in a sea of Unfinished scripts well a little soggy puddle of them anyway things that seemed fun in the shower things that only made sense in Altered States at four in the morning but they build up and most of them you never do anything with and yet you worry about them and tweak them constantly so please try to imagine how good a children's film about a small talking cat must be for a chronically lazy person like myself who never finishes anything to get home from the cinema after seeing said film for the second time in a week to push all of the other unfinished stuff to the side to tell you how good it is the first time I watched Puss in Boots the last wish it was because a five-year-old had recommended it to a friend who then recommended it to me call me snobbish but I usually like to take my artistic tip-offs from humans old enough to at least in theory operate a toilet correctly so please also try to imagine my surprise at sitting through the first 10 minutes of an animated film about a talking cat and realizing with startled horror that it wasn't just the best kids film I'd ever seen But was easily one of the best film films I'd seen in quite some time too I don't want to spoil anything for you and if you're done with listening to me I get it I really do I'm done with being me frankly but I would just say treat yourself go and watch it your Humanity will thank you and if you're not done for some masochistic reason well what was so good about this film exactly because immediately after finishing the thing I went and checked the reviews and the internet seemed just as enamored of it as I was and just the surprise that the second installment of a children's film about a talking cat which is itself a spin-off of another series of children's films worked so well on the jaded adult heart again try not to spoil anything but the themes sure helped our feline protagonist has used up his eight lives and now has to contend with being on his last he's no longer Invincible he has to grow up and take care of himself to reckon with his age if you haven't been there yet in your life oh it's big fun so that hits home immediately likewise he's sacrificed what could have been a perfectly happy life with the people around him in Pursuit of building an impossibly lonely Legacy for himself one he still clings to again somewhat relatable for some of us I suspect there were aspects of the story it was impossible not to love that the small cat who talks is a bit of a drunk only he likes getting hammered on milk as a cat might do that the small talking cat will bang on all day about his importance but when it comes down to it really just wants to save his friends and reunite with his love interest that a treasure map turns up that changes the physical landscape itself depending on the heart and character of the person reading the map a plot point that is used in such such a clever way but I don't want to spoil it so I'll stop there there's even a depiction a weirdly honest accurate and Stark depiction of a panic attack something you rarely ever see in big grown-up serious films and it's actually done well and with care what what I don't have an eye for cinematography or animation or anything like that all I was watching for was the story because story is my drug personally and it became pretty clear pretty quick that the writers of this movie have perfect to the art of writing for two audiences at the same time for adults and children the jokes amusings about mortality and death and this is a delightfully dark film in places one of the characters is literally death I would imagine are a bit too dark and real for kids to interact with fully I would hope they aren't thinking that much about death anyway this stuff probably lands better with adults but the jokes and themes that are aimed at kids are more than funny enough to work for adults anyway there's a sequence about where the small talking cats previous eight lives went which I dare you to try not peeing yourself laughing at and I can't even imagine how hard this balance was to pull off I write a bit these days myself and just aiming something that one audience is hard enough but two audiences at the same time two age groups with such different standards for comedy and plotting how how now we might think that writing for two audiences is something you only have to do when making children's media I do not believe this most of the bad books I've read were bad because they forgot to write for both audiences that is the serious Adult Swim pretending to be and the children we still are at heart because we still are children at heart I promise you the books I've come to love are the ones that do it well that play with you or make you laugh or just clearly don't take themselves too seriously then smack you down with ponderings about the point of Our Lives or making sense of tragedy think of Flowers for Algernon or 100 Years of Solitude they're silly and absurd when they feel like it but Stern when they need to give you a good talking to this is also the Hallmark of a good friend of course so I think it isn't so much that kids films do writing for two audiences so well this film especially which it does but rather that media for adults does it so badly I remember a phase years ago the whole of London seemed to be going through when well-dressed bankers and lawyers in their 40s and 50s would be reading Harry Potter on the subway trying to hide the covers even when the covers were the sensible adult designs to communicate refinement and sophistication that's a bit sad I thought to myself why are they all ashamed of just liking a book series did we forget we are still kids many of the best well-read people I know are also some of the silliest who will bang on for quite some time about their personal grievances with the last five Nobel prizes in literature while at the same time they're on their way to a rave I think good readers and good film goers move past snobbery and are just interested in good or maybe I'm just trying to make myself feel better for being unexpectedly heartwarmed by a film about a talking cat I don't know but in all of this I would like to hammer home that the point of art first and foremost is to feel or to make the audience feel the point of most media even that we are feeling creatures first and thinking creatures second and if you can take care of the first bit the audience will come with you for the second we're getting real bad recently for caricaturing emotions as illogical demons hiding in lines of code of Reason inside us as though we're heroic computers who are occasionally struck down by moments of feeling that we should be ashamed of this is just such I could watch Emily another 40 times not because the cinematography is gorgeous and the writing is perfect I mean those things are true but more because it restores my faith in the idea that the world is still unbuilt and things are still happening that people are still falling in love that mystery is still alive it produces a certain feeling I can't get anywhere else because we feel first and I suspect most of our differences in preference for media are in what we like feeling not how we like it present it even friends following the kind of Pursuits are rather take an angle grinder to my eyes than express any interest in myself because those Pursuits seem so dull if I keep asking them why they like whatever it is why they're so committed eventually an answer comes out that sounds something like because I enjoy it I know an accountant who derives enormous Joy from tidying up spreadsheets I know an archaeologist who specializes in teeth of an era I can't remember and I asked him once why he cared so much about tea specifically and of that specific era and he eventually just said because it's fun and that was enough for whatever reason that was his idea of a good time it makes him feel things I have learned myself somewhat through trial and a huge amount of error that if you just Spam an audience with your particular brand of how you think the world should work local look they will not come along for the ride it's clinical and dull they came looking for Humanity and you just dished out a flat speech instead we are feeling creatures first and that is not a weakness pathos ethos and logos don't most of us remember those evenings we got to stay up a little too late as children and the adults had all had a few drinks or chilled out and let their hair down and we were staring at them laughing with each other being silly with each other thinking wait are you secretly all still kids why didn't you tell me so I like stumbling on these gems every now and then especially at the cinema especially when you walk in expecting nothing then end up trying not to give yourself a hernia laughing or crying because yeah there's a lot of junk out there but there's still plenty of writers with hearts and arts is doing better than ever a Sundance and in kids films alike I've personally learned that those months when I grow convinced everything has been done before and all ass is crap now it's just that I'm not looking hard enough the many Indie Games all over AAA titles with teams of hundreds behind them play faster than like please the perfect indie films sometimes come out of nowhere and stay with you longer than anything a warehouse of Michael Bays could have made in a lifetime watch beyond the infinite two minutes please and in every case when I think back on why they were so good all the sensible adult answers my brain wants to give about composition and pacing eventually just collapse into because it was funny or sad or left an idea in my head that I can't get out because I felt something because whoever put the thing together wasn't just interested in being clever but cared about the reader or the Watcher's Humanity too that they knew emotion is not the slave of the intellect but that the intellect is there to communicate emotions in Greater resolution this is what often bothers me so much about reading reviews of films especially the kind you used to see in newspapers by people who wore those conspicuously small reading spectacles and probably had busts of themselves on their mantle pieces mean reviews or Bland reviews paragraphs of verbose description about themes and art history when clearly all the reviewer really wants to say is I think the director is a bell island or it made me feel 19 again and I liked that but they can't because they know that'll sound too subjective so they have to dress it up in intellect it's the reason I'm writing this now not because I have anything to tell you about how to construct a children's screenplay nor do I know anything about the current state of the film industry or to be honest much care either but because something made me feel things and I'd like you to too and that's what films are supposed to do that's what we're supposed to do for each other that we need to talk about death because it's awful and everywhere that we need to talk about isolation and loneliness and confusion because they're awful and everywhere too but we should probably temper it with Grace and funnies and it can be done in any medium if done well enough even in children's media even with anthropomorphized animals my God have you read Watership Down one of the greatest explorations of tragedy and loss of the 20th century brought to you by talking bunnies this stuff works in any medium if the writers have half an idea what they're doing aren't preoccupied with making sure everyone knows they're clever and actually have a heart and small talking cat film part 2 has one of the biggest hearts I've seen in ages I am thinking of another film that also knows how to do this that also knows how to write on two levels at once to the adults we're pretending to be and the kids we're pretending not to be last year I spent a day so hungover I thought I might die in Campbellsville Kentucky I had no particular interest in dying in Campbellsville Kentucky so wandered into a cinema there and saw a film called everything everywhere all at once on a complete whim without knowing anything about it you really should see that if you haven't I walked out still as hungover but suddenly it was my soul whole again it was the first and only film to make me cry laughing then just actually cry in the space of a single run time there's one particular theme about a family member trying to get another family member back I'm trying quite hard not to ruin that for you but it cuts right to the heart and it's set alongside all manner of recurring jokes about talking raccoons and sentient rocks I thought about that film for months afterwards how can you cover the whole emotional respect Spectrum so well and not lose an overall voice how can you be playful enough to get laughs but still sufficiently sincere and emotionally believable to make the audience cry too well with Humanity that's the conclusion I came to Anyway by being honest about what makes us laugh which is pretty common among human types however clever we think we are surprise awkwardness a payoff attention Etc same with how you make us cry we're pretty Universal unresolved tragedy heartbreak who can think of pets going to the vet to be put to sleep and not get a lump in their throat it's common humanity and I suspect the shape of it is simpler than we'd like to think and more often than not is hindered by trying to be too serious or too clever but when it's done gracefully and kindly and still cleverly then yeah it's a treat I don't know how to write that kind of stuff myself but I am in awe of those who can and I will gently say that if you're looking for a good example of it you could do a lot worse than going to watch a very well written and put together film about a small talking cat because a lot of love went into it and it's extremely good

Channel: exurb2a

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Id: 9O65k561f9U

Length: 12min 3sec (723 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 07 2023