Trailer Trashin’: Academy Award Nominee A Cat in Paris Looks Like a Storybook Come to Life

It’s Tuesday here at CinemaNerdz, and that means there’s a new Trailer Trashin’ column for your reading pleasure. For the second time since this column debuted, I’m taking a look at an animated film – the official trailer for the stateside release of A Cat in Paris.

Premise: This is the story of a young girl whose cat leads her on an adventure and helps her solve a thrilling mystery that unfolds in the alleyways and on the rooftops of Paris over the course of a single evening.

My take: A Cat in Paris first appeared out of nowhere when it received an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature back in January. Now the rest of America will get a chance to see what all the fuss was about, when the film is finally released in US theaters.

First off, I have to say that I absolutely love the art style the film is using. While the phrase “it looks like a storybook come to life” may be a cliché, in this case, it’s absolutely true. Honestly, I can’t recall seeing art like this in anything other than a painting or illustration. I think you could take a freeze-frame of almost any shot in this trailer, put it in a picture frame, and put it on your wall.

Based on what we hear in this trailer, I think the voices they chose for the English dub all work. When I first watched the trailer, there was one voice that jumped out at me – Steve Blum as Nico the cat burglar. Blum is a prolific voice actor in cartoons, video games, and English dubs of anime, and I’ve been a big fan of his for a long time. From Spike Spiegel in the anime Cowboy Bebop, to Wolverine in various X-Men and Marvel Comics animated series, to Jack Cayman in the video game MadWorld, to his current role as Amon on the Nickelodeon cartoon The Legend of Korra, Blum has a long list of great characters on his resume, and I hope Nico can join that list.

I don’t feel the need to complain about much of anything here. I feel like they showed a bit too much of what I’m assuming to be the later parts of the story, but that’s unfortunately par for the course with a lot of trailers. There’s also one point that I need to bring up – would the little girl’s mom, who I guess is a detective, really be allowed to be part of the investigation to find the man who killed her husband? I’m sure there are differences between law enforcement procedures in France and the United States, but this still seems like a big conflict of interest.

But those minor complaints aside, this is a very solid trailer for what looks like a pretty good movie. The only question now is which markets the film will be released in. There’s precious few traditional hand-drawn animated films that get released over here these days, so hopefully that might help A Cat in Paris stand out from the crowd this summer movie season.

ANTICIPATION: I probably won’t get the chance to see it at the theater, but I’ll seek it out at some point.

Release Date: June 1st, 2012 in limited theaters

Starring the voices of: Anjelica Huston, Marcia Gay Harden, Matthew Modine, and Steve Blum
Directors: Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol
Writer: Alain Gagnol