Review | Tom and Jerry movie review: in live action/animated update, combative cat and mouse team are sidelined
- The beauty of the original MGM cartoon series lay in its animation and the simplicity of its story lines - cat chases mouse; repeat
- The same cannot be said of this film, which mixes live action and animated scenes so badly it is as if two different movies have been mashed together.
1.5/5 stars
This live action/animated update of the famed television cartoon series Tom & Jerry fails on all levels, featuring nothing to interest kids, their guardians, or animation buffs.
Bewilderingly, the combative cat-and-mouse team are reduced to bit-part players in their own film, which mainly focuses on the efforts of a resourceful hotel concierge (played by Chloë Grace Moretz) to ensure that a rich couple’s wedding party goes smoothly.
The action sequences featuring Tom and Jerry, which are scattered throughout the slimmest of storylines, do manage to reflect the crazy antics of the original, which continuously showed Tom being splattered on windows and doors, and bashed with household objects, while pursuing the crafty mouse Jerry.
Their personalities survive intact, too, and they are not forced to speak as they were in the similarly disastrous 1992 attempt to elevate the duo to feature film status. But there’s simply not enough good bits to sustain a full-length film.
Tom & Jerry, the original series, is one of the pillars of Western animation. Produced for the MGM studio, it was the first series to be created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, the team who later created enduring classics like The Flintstones, Yogi Bear, and Scooby Doo.