Zhang Gang's film slots the veteran Hanna-Barbera characters into a bizarre adventure, rooted in Chinese mythology, that has nothing whatsoever to do with them.
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Viva Kids That title gives a first clue towards how misbegotten and compromised this new Tom and Jerry joint is. Everybody knows that Tom and Jerry shouldn’t be searching for a forbidden compass, whatever that might be: If the perma-warring pair are on a quest for something, it ought to be, say, some pickles for a big cheese sandwich. The Hanna-Barbera cat and mouse — formerly a throwaway bunch of cartoons, now a ‘franchise’ — are all about triflingly menial disputes taken to absurd heights, leading to surreal sight gags and baroque violence. “Tom and Jerry: Forbidden Compass” gives us the most cursory of tributes to that mode in the film’s opening five minutes, as Jerry heads to a grand exhibition in New York called “Traveling Exhibition of the Astral Compass – Journey to the Enigmatic East.” (Edward Said fans are advised to bring bingo cards.) Tom is a security guard here, and forbids entrance to the little mouse, leading to a brief spate of chasing around the museum. This hubbub somehow awakens the mysterious powers of the titular compass, transporting the twosome to ‘Golden City’ in China, modeled after the Forbidden City, where a storyline based on Chinese mythology is about to get going. That is where all classic Tom and Jerry tomfoolery ends — and there are another 95 minutes to go. In Golden City we meet a character called Phoenix Master and his irritating sidekick Feeny, who resembles a thicc Big Bird with green hair coiffed à la Liberace. They have been sent down from heaven by the Celestial Master and must therefore find the compass again, with the aid of some anthropomorphic traditional roof decorations, such as ‘Sonny’, a green and pink icon of a god, or ‘Xander’, a horse-like creature. But in order to get the compass, they will have to defeat ‘Mega-Rat’, the movie’s villain, who labours away in a cave with his evil henchrats. That précis will give some idea of the alarming mental disconnect that the film puts viewers through, as it tosses Tom and indeed Jerry into this incomprehensible plot, in which the title characters will soon be reduced to the status of glorified onlookers. But before that, there’s time for a smattering of creaky scenes in which the Chinese characters mistake the American interlopers for deities and give them a sponsored-by-the-Tourism-Board visit of the premises. (“Ah, Golden Lake — when the spring flowers bloom, people come from all over! Isn’t it a beautiful sight?”) Some viewers may at this point be put in mind of “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” — another tick on your Orientalism card, if you’re playing. The Chinese characters are animated in standard-issue knock-off Pixar mode, and therefore match up just about with Tom and Jerry 2.0, but the visuals around them are ceaselessly incoherent, adding to the already harrowing levels of chaos. Chinese traditional landscape painting commingles with manga-like warfare and knockabout gags Hollywood-style, and in the background of all the migraine-inducingly hyperactive shenanigans, there appear some upsettingly undifferentiated crowds of AI-faced villagers saying ‘rhubarb rhubarb’ to one another. Throughout, Tom and Jerry: Forbidden Compass feels bafflingly out of touch and off-key, with the flavor of supermarket own-brand cornflakes. To wit, a montage in which Tom and Jerry eat a buffet of noodles and dumplings while someone or other raps, “Tom and Jerry, you and I/We’re gonna make a million, gonna touch the sky” may have the paradoxical effect of making children clamor for some soothingly 2D cartoons from the 1940s. The film’s casual use of deeply American IP in order to sell what is unmistakably a Chinese property — produced by the state-owned China Film Group in partnership with Warner Bros. and Origin Animation — may be of interest to future students of geopolitics, but even as a spectacle for kids weaned on flashing lights and brainrot it is likely to be too jumbled and bewildering. As for the parent demographic, it will only appeal to that rare subset who actively dislike their children.
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