Time was you knew where you were with Tom and Jerry. He chases the mouse; catches the mouse; the mouse gets away; Tom is flattened, gets up dazed but determined; and then it’s back to the chase. The tone changed over time – Tom was originally more scary than he became later – but essentially the fun was in the rivalry that would never cease; the plot’s piquancy was that of David and Goliath, the little mouse always getting the better of the big cat.
I can only hope the Chinese audience buys it because I couldn’t
But the old Hanna-Barbera scenario that began in 1940 has evolved and the franchise has passed into new hands. Now a little cartoon that once lasted only a matter of minutes has turned into a 3D, computer-animated, 90-minute blockbuster, Tom and Jerry: Forbidden Compass. It’s a Chinese-American production, and directed by Zhang Gang, and the premise finds the pair accidentally transported back in time to ancient China. If there’s one thing that you could say about the old T&J, it’s that it was all-American. What we get here instead is a weirdly dissonant hybrid. I can only hope the Chinese audience buys it because I couldn’t.
It starts off in the old style, with Tom as a security guard keeping the mouse out of the museum with a chase round and round the artefacts – but it turns portentous very quickly. A backstory booms out that there’s an enormously powerful thing on display called the Forbidden Compass that everyone has forgotten how to work. But hello… Jerry has managed to squeeze himself into the electric light. And now Tom is switching it on and off, and the current has got into the compass, and bingo, it’s sizzling with power and we’re in ancient China.
