Movie Thoughts: Cats in the Museum (2023)

 

• Released: March 23, 2023
  
• Directed by: Vasiliy Rovenskiy
• Running time: 1h 23min
• Rating 1.5/5

Synopsis

A young cat named Vinsent ends up at a museum and befriends the local cats there. He, alongside these other cats, is charged with protecting the paintings of the museum. But that's not exactly an easy thing to do when Vinsent is trying to balance his work with his friendship with a painting-eating mouse, as well as his connection to his potential girlfriend. Especially when a ghost starts to haunt the museum.

My Thoughts

This is a pretty bad and silly movie. Sure, it maybe could've worked if it had been handled competently, but right now this is not a good movie. Not writing-wise, not character-wise, not comedy-wise. Even the visuals are kind of a mess. The animation is fine in principle but the character designs vary wildly in quality. Some are downright uncanny valley (even our main character looks off) and others don't look like they belong together in the same movie.

The character writing is as bland and standard as you can get. Nothing feels genuine or real, it all feels phoned in and like the plot and character beats happen because the plot demands it does. Vinsent is also one of the biggest "nothing-protagonists" I've ever seen. He barely has an actual character or personality or flaws outside of "do-gooding well-meaning hero". The main villain in all this is also a twist villain of the worst kind. None of his plans feel well thought-out or deep and his twist comes right out of nowhere. He also has a lackey who just randomly shows up out of nowhere and barely contributes to the movie or plot at all. Also, Kleopatra feels like a trophy girlfriend for Vinsent and not an actual character. Her design is also very yucky. For some reason she has these pronounced hips and human hair and huge eyes with giant lashes. Doesn't help that she's one of the only female characters in the movie, at least the only female one or note.

I also just gotta say how little the first few minutes of the movie impact the plot like, at all, aside from introducing Vinsent to the audience. You'd think there'd be some kind of repercussions or importance to him growing up alone (possibly orphaned?) at an abandoned island with nothing but paintings and an aggressive dog for company. Like, this feels like a whole lot of setup for something, right? But it's not. 

Aside from introducing Vinsent and his love for paintings the whole "growing up alone at an abandoned island being constantly plagued by a dog" plays into nothing. The dog bit is referenced briefly once as a joke later on in the plot, but there is literally no significance to the rest of the setup. The dog Vinsent grew up with just vanishes from the plot after the island home is wrecked. So I feel that they either should've put more focus on the repercussions of Vinsent's unusual solitary upbringing, or just found a different way to introduce his character. He easily could just have been a stray who picked up a love for art somewhere along the way. At no place did they have to bring up stuff like an abandoned island or a dog terrorizing our protagonist since it led pretty much nowhere.

So yeah, a mess of a movie. Not even bad in a funny "so bad it's good" kinda way, just bland and forgetable with a bad tinge to it. Don't watch this.