Wildly unpredictable, visually gorgeous, and occasionally gruesome, the German animated feature Felidae is a surreal amalgam of gothic horror and noir-tinged mystery that’s definitely not for the kiddies. The film is rife with delirious dream imagery and unrestrained depictions of sadistic medical experiments, murder, and mutilation. Not to mention that, per its feline-centric title, all the central characters are cats. Felidae is the result of what might happen if a giallo director like Dario Argento took a whack at directing The Secret of NIMH.
No sooner has the urbane Francis (Ulrich Tukur), accompanied by his feckless human “can opener,” a romance writer named Gustav Löbel (Manfred Steffen), moved into new digs in a new part of town, than he meets the grizzled Bluebeard (Mario Adorf), who supplies the profanely wise-cracking buddy component for the twisty mystery that follows. Bluebeard’s idea of a housewarming present turns out to be the spectacle of a graphically deceased cat. Pretty soon, Francis’s inordinate, yet entirely species-typical, curiosity puts him on the trail of the killer.
Francis’s investigation is governed less by pure ratiocination and more by happenstance and a series of premonitory dreams. Director Michael Schaack renders these dream sequences suitably surreal, dominated by at times extreme imagery that not only portends future events but also lays bare the deeper layers of Francis’s fears and anxieties. These run to existential depths, fixated on the meaning of life or, more to the point, the apparent lack thereof.
Nor does the philosophical inquiry end there. In the course of his investigations, Francis encounters an older, computer-literate cat named after Blaise Pascal (Klaus Maria Brandauer), a 17th-century French philosopher who famously proposed a wager concerning belief in the existence of God, coming down fully in favor of faith. Francis’s name, on the other hand, refers to Pascal’s British coeval Francis Bacon, who put his money on reason and the scientific method. Francis the cat ultimately synthesizes the two, making deductions and seeking clues, but also guided by the superrational influence of his unconscious.
The forces of faith in their less reasonable aspect are represented by Joker (Ulrich Wildgruber) and his cult of electricity, who are obsessed with the cleansing power of pain and suffering, seeking the ultimately fatal mortification of the flesh by means of electrocution. Their prophet and object of worship is a mythical martyr named Claudandus, who underwent a series of ghastly medical experiments at the hands of Professor Preterius (Gerhard Garbers). It just so happens that Preterius used to live in Francis’s house, and the film cleverly uses Francis’s accidental discovery of his video diary to unfold its harrowing backstory.
Like The Secret of NIHM, Felidae comes down stridently against scientific research being conducted via the torture of animals. But Felidae goes further by grappling with elements of eugenics, the process of selective breeding to produce a so-called master race or species, which has obvious connotations to Nazi practices given the film’s specifically German context. That co-screenwriter and source novelist Akif Pirinçci is a Turkish immigrant adds color to the fact that Francis is a recent arrival in this neighborhood; rather than being content to simply assimilate, though, Francis works to uncover the sordid underbelly of his newfound feline society.
Francis ultimately comes to embody a policy of inclusion, espousing the embrace of differences. Ironically, Pirinçci opted to go another route, eventually embracing a politics of exclusion and hatred, calculatingly trying to out-German the German right-wing establishment when it comes to xenophobia and intolerance. But the gorgeous, gruesome, and surreal Felidae stands as a stern rebuttal of those ideas, couched in the generic trappings of gothic horror and the murder mystery. As so often has been the case in the annals of cinema, the tropes of somewhat “disreputable” genres make for an excellent Trojan horse to convey subversive notions.
Image/Sound
Deaf Crocodile’s Blu-ray release of Felidae features a brand new restoration of the film, sourced from a 4K scan of the original camera negative, that is stunning. The colors look amazingly vibrant, blacks are deep and inky, and the fine details of the exquisitely rendered backgrounds really stand out. The German Master Audio stereo track sounds full and vibrant, whether it’s putting across the atmospheric score from Anne Dudley of the ’80s synth-pop band Art of Noise, snippets lifted from Gustav Mahler, or the wistful title song performed by Boy George.
Extras
Deaf Crocodile includes a handful of quite informative bonus materials. The commentary track by physical media expert Ryan Verrill and film professor Dr. Will Dodson covers a lot of intriguing ground, ranging from the film’s debt to the works of Don Bluth to everything you always wanted to know about cat coitus but were afraid to ask. The duo also delves into Akif Pirinçci’s source material, comparing the film with relevant portions of the text and touching on the writer’s lamentable embrace of extremist political views.
The disc features three lengthy interviews, all conducted by Deaf Crocodile label co-founder Dennis Bartok, with director Michael Schaak, layout and storyboard artist Armin Melkonian, and animators Doug Bennett, Paul Bolger, Eamonn Butler, Bernie Denk, and Desmond Downes. These discussions touch on the subjects’ backgrounds and career arcs, but mostly lean heavily into the technical details of 2D animation to often fascinating effect.
Overall
Gorgeous, gruesome, and slightly surreal, the German animated feature Felidae examines hefty sociopolitical issues through the lens of familiar genre tropes.
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