In short: Felidae (1994)

This German animated mystery directed by Michael Schaack adapts the at the time in Germany rather popular cat mystery novel by Akif Pirinçci. It’s not one of those nice and cosy cat mysteries you might know, though, but rather one concerning serial killing among cats investigated by smart-ass new cat in town Francis (Ulrich Tukur). Therefor, it containing quite a bit of sex and violence, the novel as well as the film pretty clearly treating cat society as one with obvious parallels to human society. It’s also fond of hitting every serial killer thriller trope you care to mention, just with cleverly drawn cats instead of humans. Also making an appearance are a weird cat cult, cat racial theories, human experiments on cats, and other nasty things.

The film, being German and all, does of course also include many a scene meant to demonstrate that the filmmakers have read all the right, serious books, know their Mahler (nothing wrong with Mahler, obviously), and so on, and so forth, all of which is fortunately presented with a pleasant degree of self-irony (also known as the only good kind of irony), and often integrated into Francis’s awesome psychedelic – and somewhat prophetic - dream sequences. The script is actually as clever as the whole film thinks it is, so while there always seems to be a shadow of a certain kind of self-satisfied smirk playing around the film’s mouth, it actually puts the work in to earn its right to smirk by actually having a plot that works very well once you’ve accepted its basic – pleasantly weird – conceits, and treating this plot, quite against German writing traditions, without derision.


The animation isn’t something I’d call terribly special, but then, there were so few German animation movies being made at the time (many of those that were made directed by Schaack, by the way, and absolutely dreadful) that encountering something that isn’t dumb and does what it is supposed to do for the film to work and flow properly is certainly nothing to sneer at. Particularly not since the film goes all out when it comes to its (German) voice actors, getting excellent performances out of Tukur, Mario Adorf and Klaus Maria Brandauer and a cast of well-known German voice actors. And hey, it’s so German, it even has a title song sung by Boy George.