Review: The Royal Cat doesn't land on its feet

I'd like to start this review by thanking IMDb for having all of the character names listed on their page for The Royal Cat, because those names were nowhere to be found on Letterboxd or on the press email I got for this movie, and while I was watching it, I was a little worried. I kept wondering if I was hearing the names correctly, if I would be able to spell them, blah blah blah. I try to always be as accurate as possible in my reviews, so it was a point of some stress.

And yes, the fact that I was thinking so much about how character names might be spelled during The Royal Cat should tell you about how engaging I found the movie to be.

Some people like to pan a movie. It lets them really sharpen their knives, get clever, get nasty, have a little fun. It probably is easier to make a bad review fun than a good review. I think when I was younger, and was a more general movie blogger, I enjoyed it, too. But I think now that I'm older, and I make my living in the industry (my day job is in production, weee), and I focus on animated movies, I find myself trying to never write a pan, or to be too harsh in my reviews. If I dislike a movie, I'll say so. I'll say why I dislike it, and why I think it's bad. But I always try to find the good in it, too, and to soften the blows where I can.

Because it's hard to make a movie, and animation is such a long and arduous process, and the result of so many people's work. I don't take joy in disliking that work. But hey, not every movie is good.

And The Royal Cat isn't good. It's not necessarily that bad, either. Well, it's bad, but its greater sin is that it's pretty boring. I found myself struggling to focus, my mind wandering, thinking about how to spell these names I had never heard before. It was a bummer, definitely not the headspace I want to be in when I watch a movie.

And it didn't need to be this way. There are some solid bones here. The Royal Cat follows two main characters: the eponymous cat, Zhan Ao, who once fought alongside a legendary general, but now lives as a stray who doesn't clearly remember his past; and Bao Zhang (hot), an apprentice investigator who always strives to seek the truth, and has quasi-psychic abilities. Or maybe he's autistic in that Sherlock way where he's able to see the strings that connect reality. Not super clear.

Anyways, these two become partners in solving two strange incidents. One is an ongoing case where people are mysteriously turning into animals. The other is a kidnapping of the royal prince, who was swapped out with Zhan Ao, causing the latter to be labeled a demon and hunted by the city's guards. Bao Zhang wants to solve the case because he's noble (and hot). Zhan Ao is in it more to save his own tail (or butt, since he doesn't have a tail). But they make a good team, and good progress.

So the set-up is there, and what's more, the way the mysteries are solved is pretty nice. Rather than being all one big case, they kind of intersect and stack, so once one is solved, the other takes the spotlight, which is a nice way to kind of jolt the engine back to life. But the problem is that the engine doesn't have all that much juice in it to begin with. The characters are all bland, the kinks of the mystery kind of neatly untangle without too much hassle. There are multiple twist villains, which is fine, but also just made me shrug. I kept wanting there to be more personality, more fun, more something to make this feel like it isn't just another by-the-numbers adventure that I'll forget in a week. Hell, I feel like I'm forgetting it as I'm writing this review.

I think it probably just needed to lean more fully into any of the directions it sort of tip-toes toward. Overall, it feels kind of like a Detective Pikachu spin: a buddy-cop investigation movie with that enjoyable odd-couple dynamic. But the buddies don't have enough chemistry to really pop. It could've gone more fully action-y, which could've been cool, because some of the fight scenes are pretty dope. (Those scenes are also where the animation shines the most; otherwise, it's serviceable but forgettable). Or it could have dialed up the fantasy to the nth degree, because there are demons and shapeshifters and spells here, but the movie still doesn't feel epic.

So The Royal Cat ends up as a bit of a lifeless dud where you can catch glimpses of the untapped potential, which also makes it a little sad to watch. But it's ultimately harmless, not offensively bad or ugly or uninspired. It just clearly could've been more, and hopefully when (first-time) director Liang Cao gets to make another movie, it'll be a little sturdier, more confident, and fun.