‘Tom & Jerry’ stayed animated while entering the live-action world in a new HBOMax film … because of course they did. Photo from imbd.com.
“Tom & Jerry” is a childhood classic that made it through so many generations. A television show where a cat named Tom is constantly trying to get rid of a mouse named Jerry, who very often outsmarts him. The show was always pretty entertaining to watch, and I was excited to see that a movie was coming out on HBOMax. Having watched it, I now think that “Tom & Jerry” probably should have stayed in the realm of television.
I’m not going to lie, this movie was a bit difficult to get through. It lacked the classic “Tom & Jerry” humor that the television show had, and the animation just didn’t fit right for me. In the movie, all of the people are real, while all of the animals in the film were animated. So every part where a human was interacting with an animal just looked really odd, even though I did think Jerry was really cute. What was even more disturbing was that some of the food was animated, such as meat and fish, and for some reason, that was really just freaky.
“Tom & Jerry” has been on our television screens for over 80 years, and of course they have evolved a lot during that time, but throughout its years on television, a lot of things stayed the same. What I like about the “Tom & Jerry” cartoons is that they are one, short, and two, the music and sound effects always made it funnier. Taking away these two aspects changed the vibe a lot, and not particularly for the better.
Let’s get into what this movie is about though. A girl named Kayla (Chloe Grace Moretz) fakes her way into a job at a very highly esteemed hotel to work for a wedding. Tom and Jerry fit into this equation, slightly (I use the word slightly because they are definitely not main characters in this film at all) because they are unwelcomed hotel guests. The movie revolves way more around Kayla’s story than Tom and Jerry’s, which effectively sidelines them in their own movie. The whole movie is a bit all over the place to say the least, and I hate to say it, but it was not very funny.
It wasn’t all bad though, and there were some positives in the movie worth highlighting. The whole time I was scared that Tom and Jerry were going to start talking. I really did not want that to happen because I think that would stretch way too far away from the older TV shows. Luckily, they never did, except for one small part where Tom starts singing at the piano; strange, I know.
Another positive is that I didn’t think the acting was bad. I can imagine that working on a movie with so much animation can be difficult, but I think all the actors did a good job with it. My favorite parts of the movie were definitely the battles between Tom and Jerry, because after all, that’s the essence of what the TV show is about. I won’t spoil anything, but I also did like the end wedding scene too.
There are some things that I just don’t think need to be changed, and I think “Tom & Jerry” is one of those things. The television show was such a classic, and classics are typically a hard act to follow.