The Rabbi's Cat

Algiers in the 1930s. A rabbi's cat eats the parrot and starts to speak. The first thing it does is lie. The rabbi wants it kept away from his daughter; the cat wants a bar mitzvah and to be Jewish. Then a painter turns up from Russia and they set off into Africa in search of a lost Jewish tribe. Joann Sfar and Antoine Delesvaux direct, from Sfar's own graphic novel. The best thing about it is that it sanctifies nobody. The cat asks theological questions and gets no answers; the rabbi, the imam, the Orthodox priest and the European painter each present their certainties in turn and each is made equally ridiculous. The visual language stays faithful to Sfar's drawing: colour used as a stain, wavering lines, backgrounds like watercolour. It is a deliberate refusal of the smoothness of digital animation. Another of its subjects is colonial Algiers: Jewish, Muslim and French communities living side by side and separately in one city, and how fragile that arrangement was. It won best animated film at the César awards. Who it is for: viewers who like adult animation and ironic narrative about religion. Who it is not for: the structure is episodic and the story disperses in the second half, and it was not designed for children.