Cat and Dog

When the CGI Meows and the Jokes Bark

I’ll admit it: I went into Cat and Dog expecting a fluffy, forgettable romp. A French comedy about a cat and dog on a road trip, voiced by some of the country’s biggest comedy stars? It sounded like the kind of film that would either charm me into submission or lull me into a gentle nap.

What I didn’t expect was to spend 86 minutes oscillating between cringing at the animation and wincing at the jokes—only to find myself, against all odds, occasionally amused. Not because the film is good, but because it’s so unapologetically itself. And in a landscape where so many comedies feel focus-grouped into oblivion, there’s something almost refreshing about that.

Reem Kherici’s film is a hybrid beast—part live-action, part CGI, all chaos. The premise is simple: Monica (Kherici), the owner of Diva, a social media-famous cat, and Jack (Franck Dubosc), a thief whose dog Chichi has swallowed a stolen ruby, team up to retrieve their pets after they go missing on an airport tarmac. What follows is a road trip from Montreal to New York, complete with car chases, slapstick mishaps, and a cop (Philippe Lacheau) hot on their trail.

It’s the kind of setup that could work if the execution matched the energy of its stars. But Cat and Dog is a film that trips over its own feet—sometimes literally, given the animation—and yet, in its messiness, it reveals something oddly honest about the state of modern comedy.

The first thing you notice about Cat and Dog is the animation. Or, more accurately, the lack of it. The CGI here isn’t just bad—it’s spectacularly bad, in the way that makes you wonder if the animators were working off a single reference image of a cat and a dog and then gave up halfway through.

Diva, the influencer cat voiced by Inès Reg, moves like a taxidermied prop with the occasional twitch. Chichi, the ruby-swallowing dog played by Artus, fares slightly better, but only because his design leans into the uncanny valley with a kind of grotesque charm. The animals’ faces rarely sync with their dialogue, their movements are stiff, and their interactions with the live-action world are so jarringly unconvincing that it’s hard to focus on anything else.

Critics have been brutal about this. StudioJake Media called it "one of the most dullest comedies I’ve seen," a line so grammatically painful it almost feels like a meta-commentary on the film itself. Roger Moore at Movie Nation was even less kind, writing that Cat and Dog has "pretty much nothing to offer to anybody over the age of eight." And yet, here’s the thing: I don’t entirely disagree with them, but I also don’t think the animation is the real problem.