The Cat in the Hat used to need a rainy afternoon and a house with an absent parent. The new animated film gives him an employer, a mission and a magical hat he could lose. The expansion makes it possible to give the Cat a problem of his own. It also changes the sort of problem he poses to a child. Dr. Seuss’s visitor could make a quiet room feel like a place whose rules had been invented minutes ago. Here the visitor has come from an organization that can tell us some of the rules before he breaks them.
Bill Hader is an excellent fit for the small liberties that survive inside that machinery. The voice can suggest a man discovering the limits of an instruction at the precise moment he offers to follow it. The Cat is entertaining when it seems as though somebody’s refusal might genuinely interest him. Gabby and Sebastian, voiced by Xochitl Gomez and Tiago Martinez, have just moved and are available for a distraction of considerable duration. The older arrangement in which a child has a reason to be both grateful and uneasy still works. It is more interesting than the fate of the hat because the children can change their minds about it in the middle of a sentence.
One of the pleasures of the illustrations in the book is the amount of ordinary space Seuss leaves visible around the things the Cat has brought with him. A chair or a wall can become useful evidence of how far the situation has departed from the children’s afternoon. Animation could find a close equivalent by giving a particular object an unexpectedly sustained bit of movement. The production has the visual skill for it. A faster rate of invention can actually diminish the effect. When every object has already been animated for attention, it is hard for the next one to overturn anybody’s expectation.
Erica Rivinoja and Alessandro Carloni give the picture an abundance of visual incidents. A thing can arrive in the frame at a persuasive angle of attack. Color and movement can set the eye several simultaneous tasks. The design is clever enough to show why a child would keep looking even when a conscientious adult would like the whole thing to slow down. The stronger gags let an image briefly establish the rules for its own movement. The weaker ones have to compete with a chase or a piece of business already waiting in the next cut.
The Cat’s organization provides a large cast with something to do, including Bowen Yang’s Gary, an intern with a different relationship to the institution. There is a fine comic idea in an enterprise that has to manage professional mischief. It yields less than it should because the film is also asking the enterprise to create stakes big enough to carry the climax. An oddly specific bureaucratic objection can be very funny. A warning that the consequences may extend to the universe has less of the pleasure of watching a single objection get artfully ignored.
There is a good joke in Gary treating access to a supply closet as a privilege. It briefly gives the new institution a recognizable social hierarchy and leaves room for the Cat to exploit the difference between knowing a rule and having to obey it. The idea is small enough to remain funny after a child understands it. The larger mythology could use that sort of light touch more often. Establishing a tool that undoes things may keep the plot moving. The person guarding the tool is funnier when the film can spare a moment for the very ordinary pride he takes in having been entrusted with it.
The children’s relocation is the source of a smaller and more useful worry. Home is unsettled before the Cat gets to it. He has an opening because a few things in the household already feel out of place. If an escapade changes what one sibling can ask of the other, it has done something worth the time and noise. The movie could trust that outcome to carry considerably more of its ending. Its hardest effect to achieve is also the simplest one. Once the Cat has left a room, the room should seem a little less settled than it did before he came in.
