Quartile rating: 6/10 · 1 rating
The popular cartoon cat and mouse are thrown into a feature film. The story has the twosome trying to help an orphan girl who is being berated and exploited by a greedy guardian.
Tom and Jerry: The Movie is widely considered a misfire that fundamentally misunderstands its source material. The biggest issue is giving Tom and Jerry dialogue and a formulaic plot — the duo's appeal was always purely physical, silent slapstick comedy, so forcing them into a generic orphan rescue story strips away everything that made them distinctive. The plot is a recycled, by-the-numbers children's adventure with a cartoonishly evil villain and no real stakes. The animation is serviceable but unremarkable for the era. The ending is predictable and saccharine. Novelty scores a 1 because this actively betrays the unique, wordless format that defined the franchise, replacing it with generic animated-movie conventions.