I was excited when I heard a new animated Cat in the Hat movie was coming out, with Bill Hader voicing the Dr. Seuss trickster while also serving as an executive producer. Hader’s reliably hilarious, and a shift toward movies was probably inevitable; his HBO series Barry showed he’s serious, and he’ll likely one day write and direct some fascinating films. After the awful 2003 version with Mike Myers, there’s no way it could be the worst Cat in the Hat movie to star an SNL alum.
I wasn’t prepared, though, for how many baffling choices the new Cat in the Hat makes. It has a much more morose tone than a Cat in the Hat adaptation should have, and it often sidelines the Cat in his own movie. Most strangely of all, the film lifts about 80 percent of its ideas from Pixar’s Inside Out movies. Most of the plot is set in an adventurous memory realm that’s almost straight out of those films, and it introduces a family that isn’t adjusting well to a recent move. It looks like Inside Out, has the same setup, and it offers all the same lessons. It’s also dark at times, the way Inside Out movies should, but Cat in the Hat movies shouldn’t. The new film isn’t a straight adaptation of the original book, nor is it a sequel; it keeps the parts it likes and discards the rest.
Written and directed by Alessandro Carloni and Erica Rivinoja, the new film depicts the Cat as working for an outfit called the Institute for the Institution of Imagination and Inspiration, LLC, a bureaucracy that assigns people like him to provide cheer, without making too much of a mess. (This, too, is a Pixar lift, familiar from the plot of Monsters, Inc.) Given a last chance to avoid termination, the Cat heads to the home of a brother and sister (voiced by Xochitl Gomez and Tiago Martinez) who’ve just left their home and moved to a new apartment with their single mom (America Ferrera).
The overstuffed plot has the Cat using a gizmo that can turn back time, losing it, and spending most of the movie searching for it in a familiar-looking magical mind-palace that contains all the memories of each family member. There two sassy gay cartoon sidekicks, voiced by Bowen Yang and Titus Burgess, and an angry landlady, voiced by Paula Pell. The other big issue is the characterization of the Cat in the Hat character—he’s not nearly chaotic enough. He’s a trickster with centuries of tradition, but we don’t really see enough of that side of him.
In fact, the story sidelines him from the action too often. Hader doesn’t get to do much with the part, and the only vocal performance that impressed me was Matt Berry, as the goldfish.
There are some elements that are familiar from the Dr. Seuss book that dates back to the 1950s, including Thing 1 and Thing 2 (among other Things) and some witty rhymes. But one gets the distinct sense that the filmmakers would rather be making a Pixar movie and retrofitted the script for one into a Cat in the Hat movie instead.