It is a truth universally acknowledged that not only are cats better than dogs, but cat films are better than dog films. Proof of this arrives on Friday with the release of Kedi, an Istanbul-set documentary by the first-time feature director Ceyda Torun. Kedi is named after one of several characterful cats whose daily lives feature in the film. The stories of these cats are fondly and reverently told by human acolytes, and the film is full of the kind of strange, profound moments of wisdom that only occur when staring into an animal’s inscrutable, calm eyes.
That’s in contrast to, say, A Dog’s Purpose, a film about a dog’s reincarnating spirit and its various sad-sack owners that was released earlier this year, amid controversy concerning leaked on-set footage of a visibly distressed German shepherd being dunked in running water. That film aimed for a similar sort of pet-based profundity, but fell far short. Peter Bradshaw described it as “sentimental” and “icily manipulative”.
A Dog’s Purpose isn’t the runt of the litter, but very much typical of the breed. For decades, a handful of films about Britain’s two favourite pet species have been released every year and the dog films, like dogs, tend to be soppy, samey and obsessed with loyalty to a ludicrous extent. They include 50s tear-jerker Old Yeller (1957), 00s tear-jerker Marley & Me (2008), and all the tear-jerking Lassie films that ever were. Cat films, on the other hand, are like cats: elegant, philosophical and irreverent. They include the jazzy, design-influencing Disney animation The Aristocats (1970), enchanting Studio Ghibli classic The Cat Returns (2002) and several oddball horror films riffing on the Edgar Allan Poe story The Black Cat. The best of the bunch is from 1934, marking the first on-screen pairing of Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff.
Of course, there are exceptions. Interesting dog films include the animated JR Ackerley adaptation My Dog Tulip from 2009. Or last year’s Wiener-Dog, by the noted misanthrope Todd Solondz, in which various dachshunds become vehicles and projections for their owners’ personal failings. Solondz seems to have slightly more respect for dogs than he does for humans, but that’s not saying much. Counterbalancing this, there are the sprinkling of irredeemably rubbish cat capers such as Top Cat (2012) and Garfield: The Movie (2004).
So why do mutt movies outnumber feline flicks by a ratio of around two to one? This reflects the reality that dogs, by nature, are so much easier to train in the rudiments of performance. No self-respecting cat would ever put in the hours necessary to mimic actor Jean Dujardin’s movements at the breakfast table, like Uggie did in The Artist (2011), let alone commit to the arduous publicity tour that Uggie also undertook. That’s why the notion that forms the plot of most dog movies – a pet who’d do anything to protect, find or save their owner – just isn’t plausible when applied to a cat. As Kedi’s wise, old Bosphorus fisherman has it: “It is said that cats are aware of God’s existence, but dogs are not. Dogs think people are God, but cats don’t. Cats know that people act as middlemen to God. They’re not ungrateful – they just know better.”
So, while dogs are more likely to have their own dedicated showcase, cats are more likely to give scene-stealing performances in whatever film they casually slink into. Think of the perpetually unimpressed cat in Elle, whose cold observation of the harrowing opening scene mirrors the camera’s own detached gaze. Or the marmalade moggie from Inside Llewyn Davis, whose enigmatic appeal and mutable identity has inspired several out-there theories on the internet.
Dogs can be trained to hit their marks, but only cats possess true star quality. If animals were eligible for Academy Awards (which they should be), a cat would get the best supporting actor nod every year – and then never bother turning up to the ceremony, because they’d always have somewhere better to be. As Joel Coen said of working with “pain in the ass” cats on Inside Llewyn Davis: “It was pointed out to us by the trainer that dogs want to please you, but cats only want to please themselves.”
People-pleasing, as any auteur will tell you, is the death of cinema, but predictable pets make for predictable plots. Ever since Blake Snyder first published his 2005 screenwriting manual Save the Cat!, cats have been unfairly associated with unambitious, story-by-numbers film-making. In fact, those, character-humanising “save the cat” scenes would be much easier to pull off with a trained dog who won’t decide to jump out of the tree just before the first assistant director yells “action!”.
This is also why dog films are inherently conservative – see the 1955 nuclear family-promoting Lady and the Tramp – and cat films, even at their most commercial, take a walk on the wild side. We won’t see Puss in Boots from the 2011 Dreamworks animation settling down into domesticity any time soon. He’s far too fabulous for that.
Obviously, no partisan pet owners can claim to be entirely objective on the matter, but there is some hard data available on a closely related subject: the cultural tastes of animal lovers. Last summer, data scientists at Facebook compared a sample of 160,000 users and found a strong correlation between people who liked cats and people who liked masterworks such as Trainspotting, Alien and A Clockwork Orange. Your average dog owner, on the other hand, is more likely to be a fan of Fifty Shades of Grey, The Blind Side and The Notebook, and, what’s more, is happy to advertise this fact on social media. Now ask yourself: which of the two groups strikes you as the more discerning?
- Kedi is released in the UK on 30 June.
