‘The Cat in the Hat’ Review: Can a Cat Built for Chaos Survive an Office Job?

‘The Cat in the Hat’ finally gets a full animated feature, landing in theaters on November 6 from Warner Bros. Pictures Animation. Directors Erica Rivinoja and Alessandro Carloni have the job of making audiences forget the 2003 Mike Myers version, which is not a tall order. Bill Hader pulls on the red and white hat this time, and he brings a very different energy.

The film wraps the familiar rainy day visit in a brand new frame. Our Cat now works for the Institute for the Institution of Imagination and Inspiration, a company that sends whimsical agents into homes to cheer up sad kids. His boss, Mr. Hoogeboom, voiced by Giancarlo Esposito, is ready to fire him over the wreckage he leaves behind, until Sherri from HR, played by Quinta Brunson, talks him into one final chance.

That chance comes in the form of siblings Gabby and Sebastian, who have just landed in a cramped new apartment with their hospital working mother Carmen, voiced by America Ferrera. The Cat sneaks along a Go-Backer, a gadget that rewinds time, and it promptly drops into one of the family’s moving boxes. A magical red couch becomes the vehicle for a search through the family’s belongings, which is a smart way to turn a thin picture book into a feature, and I wanted to love it more than I did.

Plenty here deserves praise. The animation shifts between three distinct looks, from a monochrome prologue to a loud and crowded office to the inner worlds inside the boxes, and each one feels like a real place rather than a filter. Hader is wonderfully slippery as the Cat, and Matt Berry gets some of the sharpest laughs as the siblings’ posh goldfish Waffles. Bowen Yang as an intern and Paula Pell as a nosy landlady make the most of every moment they get.

The trouble is that the script cannot stop adding things. Midway through, a monstrous winged creature shows up to hunt the Go-Backer, and we are suddenly told the fabric of the universe is at risk. Then come the Things, in numbers so large they stop being a joke and become a crowd to wade through. The central family story is already enough to carry the film, and every extra threat chips away at it.

When the movie slows down, it actually finds something. Gabby has drifted away from her marching band past and from her mother, and the box adventures slowly show her why Mom has made the choices she has. A few of those moments genuinely landed with me, and they are the film at its best. But the film keeps spelling out its lessons in plain language instead of trusting kids to feel them, and the ending ties everything up so quickly that it almost shrugs.

There is also a bigger question about what this Cat is for. The original character is a gleeful agent of mess, and here his mischief is tracked, scored and managed by a corporation, which takes some of the danger out of him. A Cat with a performance review is a funny idea for about ten minutes, but it does not replace the unruly spirit that made him famous.

So here is where I land. ‘The Cat in the Hat’ is a handsome, well voiced and frequently funny animated adventure that buries its best idea under a pile of plot. I enjoyed Hader, Berry and the look of the thing more than I can say about the story, and the emotional stretches earned some goodwill. I would give it 6 out of 10.

Did the Cat’s new corporate makeover work for you, or do you miss the pure chaos of the book? Let me know in the comments whether you agree with my verdict.