Dancing to the Toon of ‘Cats’

“Cats Don’t Dance” is the cleverest animated feature to come along in many years. At a time when many animated features resemble drawn live-action, “Cats” feels like a cartoon. It’s much closer in spirit to the freewheeling Warners and MGM shorts of the’40s and ‘50s than the bloated, much-ballyhooed “Space Jam” (and cost about one-quarter as much).

A spoof of ‘30s Hollywood backstage musicals, “Cats” doesn’t take itself too seriously and never preaches at the audience. Blithely optimistic feline Danny (voice by Scott Bakula) comes to Hollywood from Kokomo, Ind., determined to become a musical comedy star at Mammoth Studios--only to discover that animal performers are relegated to second-class status, like the Toons in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” No one works harder at keeping the animals in their place than Mammoth’s biggest star, Darla Dimple (Ashley Peldon), a blond moppet who conceals an ego Caligula might envy behind a grotesquely saccharine facade.

Determined to break through the “fur barrier,” Danny convinces a Noah’s ark of performers that includes a terpsichorean hippo (a wonderfully giggly Kathy Najimy), a fish-and-goat tango act and a piano-playing elephant to put on an elaborate production number. In the best Dick Powell/Ruby Keeler tradition, they wow a theater full of Hollywood bigwigs and win the show-biz careers they deserve.

Rather than copy the opulent visuals of the Disney features, director Mark Dindal and his artists employ a more stylized, less detailed look and match the characters’ movements to it. When Danny goes into one of his dance routines, the animators use a series of poses and a few quick steps to convey the feeling of a dance, rather than trying to reproduce the actual steps. The artists at UPA invented this kind of limited animation in the early ‘50s for films like “Gerald McBoing-Boing” and “Rooty-Toot-Toot”; 45 years later, it remains an effective way to suggest complex motions in a few well-chosen drawings.

Brian McEntee’s flamboyant palette and angular designs suggest a Midwesterner’s Technicolor daydream of Hollywood. The Day-Glo colors highlight such visual gags as the bow in Darla’s curls forming demonic horns in silhouette. Six songs by Randy Newman suggest the ‘30s milieu, but deliver enough ‘90s pizazz to please modern listeners.

Like the old cartoons it evokes, “Cats” cuts across demographic divisions and plays to adults and children on different levels. Kids will enjoy the slapstick gags and straightforward storytelling; older viewers will catch the more sophisticated wordplay and references to other films: Danny’s girlfriend-cat, Sawyer (speaking voice by Jasmine Guy, singing voice by Natalie Cole), is named after Ruby Keeler’s character in “42nd Street.”

A few sequences go on a bit too long and the animation of the elephant character often looks awkward, but these are minor cavils.

In “Where Are the Movies Moving?,” an essay written in the late 1920s, Aldous Huxley praised the silent Felix the Cat shorts as an outstanding illustration of his dictum, “What the cinema can do better than literature or the spoken drama is to be fantastic.” The high-stepping cats, hippos and fish in “Cats Don’t Dance” would have delighted him.