Movie Thoughts: Kitty Love: An Homage to Cats (2020)

• Released: September 30th 2020
  
• Directed by: Mark Verkerk
  
• Running time: 1 h
• Rating 2.5/5

Synopsis

A documentary "presented" by the Netherlands' most famous cat, Abatutu, detailing all about various cat behaviors and how he became a star.

My Thoughts

Objectively, this is not a very good documentary. Sure, the segments that actually qualify as being a documentary are decent, but about a third of the movie just consists of compilations of cat videos from the Internet. And, you know, if I want to watch cute cat compilations, I'd just use YouTube, not watch an actual professionally-made documentary.

The documentary consists of three different types of segments. The first and main segment is regarding Abatutu, the film's "presenter" and a very famous animal actor in the Netherlands at the moment. He narrates the whole thing (though interestingly they used a female voice actor for his narrations. Kitty is a trans icon) and pretty much ties the entire thing together as we follow his journey of how he went from being a barn cat to a famous Dutch cat-actor. Another segment is where a certain behavior or interaction of cats is detailed (e.g. cats and dogs, or cats and food). These segments are then followed with shorter sub-segments of Internet cat videos that connect to the larger segment. So in the section "Cats and dogs" you'll see videos of cats and dogs interacting, etc.

And, you know, these segments are mildly amusing. I love cats, so seeing them do cute things is obviously something I like. But it doesn't belong in a professionally made documentary, especially when it fills up such a huge part of the running time. It's like they only had 45 minutes but they decided they didn't have enough material yet, so they took to the Internet and gathered more footage there instead. These cute cat videos, despite being amusing, also were simply the least interesting parts of the documentary. I was invested about the descriptions of cat behaviors and Abatutu's journey of becoming an actor. So to constantly be interrupted with these compilations was a bit jarring to be honest.

Another thing that kind of bothered me in this was that the way the cats were handled were a bit dubious at times. Okay, for the compilation videos which they gathered from the Internet I obviously can't really judge the makers of this documentary as they are unrelated (though the makers could've responsibly chosen not to feature certain videos, such as cats stalking small birds). But large portions of the documentary also just show Abatutu walking around freely around streets and parks, no leash or anything. That's simply not safe. Cats don't belong outside unsupervised (or even, in this case, supervised only by a camera man). Abatutu could easily be grabbed by a large dog or something, or start hunting smaller animals himself.

House cats just don't belong outside unsupervised and unleashed, the same way dogs don't and we keep them leashed 90% of the time for a reason. So to see quite a lot of clips of this (very valuable) cat just walking around cities and parks all willy-nilly had me a bit concerned. He's also quite a bit overweight. According to his owner this is simply how he has been since kittenhood and that he simply can't lose weight, so I really can't speak on whether or not he's healthy. But he does have a significant amount of fat you don't normally find on your average domestic shorthair.

Overall this is just a cute documentary and if you like cats, it's not really offensive, either. Just not very good objectively. The non-compilation segments are decent but not great, and the jarring YouTube video segments just kind of ruin it and make it look unprofessional sometimes.