‘The Cat in the Hat’ Review: A Tidy Rainy Day Gone Gloriously Out of Hand

Warner Bros. Pictures Animation gives the most famous rainy day in children’s literature a brand new coat of paint with ‘The Cat in the Hat’, opening in theaters on November 6. Erica Rivinoja and Alessandro Carloni write and direct, trading the unsettling live action version of 2003 for a fully animated adventure voiced by Bill Hader. It is a big swing for a book that famously runs on a few hundred words.

This time the Cat is not a freelance menace but an employee of a gleaming outfit called the Institute for the Institution of Imagination and Inspiration. He cheers up gloomy kids for a living, yet his mess meter keeps climbing, and Giancarlo Esposito’s Mr. Hoogeboom is ready to fire him. Quinta Brunson’s Sherri from HR buys him one last chance, a visit to siblings Gabby and Sebastian, who have just moved to a new town and miss their old life.

Here is where I land on the film as a whole. ‘The Cat in the Hat’ is a movie of terrific parts that never quite agrees to be one movie. A time rewinding Go Backer, a snarling creature called Something, a threatened universe and a family drama about moving all get crammed into 107 minutes, and none of them gets room to breathe.

The animation is the easy win. The film shifts between a drained black and white opening, a bright cartoon office and a wild stretch of imagined worlds inside moving boxes, and each look feels chosen rather than assigned. Giant pasta people and a couch that doubles as a spaceship are exactly the sort of silly invention this character should be handing out.

The voices carry plenty of the load. Hader makes the Cat quick, vain and weirdly lovable, and Matt Berry as Waffles the goldfish is a deadpan delight who steals nearly every scene he enters. Xochitl Gomez and Tiago Martinez sell the sibling bond, and America Ferrera gives their overworked mom real warmth. Bowen Yang, Tituss Burgess and Paula Pell pop up in small roles with more personality than the plot gives them.

The jokes land more often than they should, including one cheeky gag that sails over small heads and straight to the grown ups. The Things, who communicate by slapping and tooting, will thrill younger viewers and test parental patience in equal measure. The trouble is the second half, where the stakes swell until the mood stops feeling like a rainy afternoon at all.

The story also keeps explaining itself. Every lesson about change, friendship and home is announced loudly and repeated, as if the audience could not possibly work it out from the images. Mr. Hoogeboom’s motives never quite add up, and the wrap up arrives so tidily that it feels more like a shrug than a payoff. Little ones may also find Something genuinely frightening.

I walked out liking this cat more than the movie built around him. The craft, the voice work and the laughs are real, but the overstuffed plot and heavy handed morals keep it from becoming the playful modern take it keeps promising to be. I give ‘The Cat in the Hat’ 6 out of 10.

Does my verdict on ‘The Cat in the Hat’ match yours, and did Hader’s Cat win you over, so tell me in the comments below?