The Cat in the Hat: A 2003 Time Capsule

When I’m not plucking away at this blog, I am a nanny for a six-year-old boy. His taste in film is eclectic and unpredictable. When I first started working with him almost a year and a half ago, he was big into all four Toy Story films, but soon abandoned them for an intense obsession with the Ghostbusters franchise, followed by the inevitable Despicable Me rabbit hole.

In our time together, I’ve tried to introduce him to new films he might enjoy (read: that I will also enjoy watching) to varying degrees of success. Today, we had a cozy movie morning (after this past week, we both really needed it), and for some reason he picked out the 2003 live action adaptation of The Cat in the Hat.

I was eight years old when this movie came out in theaters, and I vaguely recall liking it. If you haven’t had the opportunity to see this film, don’t worry about it. It’s the picture book The Cat in the Hat, but way worse! A friend of mine even told me it’s the film that caused Dr. Seuss’ widow to no longer allow any live action film adaptations of her late husband’s work.

Watching this again got me thinking about the kind of movies that we show kids. Of course, the reigning empire of kid and family friendly entertainment is the extended Disney intellectual property conglomerate, and I was a huge Disney kid growing up. While I don’t want to make blanket statements about Disney films as a whole (or get into the long discussion of how some of the movies have aged poorly), I think there’s a reason why their storytelling ethos has been dominating the entertainment market for over 80 years. For the most part, their films are visually stunning and often on the cutting edge of cinematic technology. They often involve classic characters, stories, or storytelling elements that are accessible to kids but not pandering or dumbed-down, and through that familiarity ask them to empathetically engage with difficult circumstances for their main characters. They don’t shy away from death or tragedy in their character arcs, but things do always turn out okay in the end.

Movies like The Cat in the Hat are more or less the antithesis to the Disney canon. In the movie, Mike Meyers, fresh off of the biggest non-Disney animated hit at the time, Shrek, takes on the titular Cat, and somehow came to the decision (with other creatives on the film, I presume) to take a beloved cartoon cat and make him a giant, furry, caricature of Bert Lahr. His whole shtick is doing a Brooklyn accent and basically being a one-man vaudeville act, going in and out of silly (and often stereotypical) accents and characters in an effort to give Sally and Conrad a fun day…. I think. His motivations as a character are not very clear.

Sally and Conrad, played by Dakota Fanning and Spencer Breslin, two of the biggest child stars of the early aughts who both have since been surpassed by the fame and talent of their younger siblings, go along with Cat’s shenanigans, but as things get more and more out of control it’s hard to see why. They don’t really seem like they’re having fun, and the disastrous outcomes of the Cat’s ideas cause them a great deal of stress. At least in part, it’s because the only way out is through. The only person who can fix the Cat’s mess is the Cat (and Thing One and Thing Two, but we’re not even gonna get to them today).

Unlike Mary Poppins, who also arrives to provide structure to children who need her, the Cat provides chaos. While Mary Poppins leaves Jane and Michael Banks more equipped to handle the world and with a stronger relationship with their parents, the Cat leaves the kids with nothing but a memory. The film tries to remedy this by developing the character of the mother, who is unseen in the book, and showing her loosen up at the end when her kids show her how to have fun by jumping on the fancy living room couch. But the Cat’s version of fun, pre-successful clean-up and the mother’s return, is dangerous and not replicable without his special Seussian magic. So what do Sally and Conrad, and the kids watching this film, get out of this movie?

Ugh I sound like one of those horrible people from the culture wars of the 90s that thinks that all kids entertainment has to have a clearly present moral theme. That’s not what I’m trying to say, and I also want to go on the record saying that entertainment for entertainment’s sake is totally fine. I wrote my entire first blog post about how much I love bad movies with questionable messaging.

That being said, I do think it’s worth examining the media that we expose kids to. Because they are not approaching the world with a critical lens, that’s part of the job of the adults in their lives. I’m personally less worried about showing kids films that deal with serious topics (they’re more resilient than we give them credit for), but I am concerned with the subliminal messaging that easily gets through. For example, The Cat in the Hat movie does feature the type of queerphobic and fatphobic jokes that were typical of kids movies of that era, and basically all eras. Need a quick laugh? Put a male character in a dress or poke fun at the fat babysitter, whose laziness allows for the Cat to enter into their lives unbidden.

And while the story does encourage kids and grown-ups to loosen up and live a little, it doesn’t heed what I believe is the core tenant of the book: “It’s fun to have fun, but you have to know how.” The Cat is able to show Conrad and Sally all of the fun under the tips of their noses, and how to clean it all up when their playing is through. And as someone who has worked with kids since I myself was a kid, let me tell you that both imaginative play with whatever is available to you and taking responsibility for messes are two very important lesson for kids (and adults, who are we kidding) to learn. The movie just has bonkers levels of destruction, magically wiped away, and evil Alec Baldwin. As one does.

So anyway, those are my thoughts on the 9% rotten on Rotten Tomatoes film, The Cat in the Hat. I do not recommend it for children or adults, not just because of my qualms with the messaging, but because it is genuinely a very stupid and poorly done film. Next time it’s wet and the sun is not sunny, remember that you can still have lots of fun that is funny… but maybe pick a movie not adapted from a genius picture book but completely ruined by trying to stretch it to 82 minutes of content that kids and their parents might both enjoy. I’d recommend Wall-e.