The Cat Came Back

The animation “The Cat Came Back” opens with a shot of a house on top of a hill at night. Everything is a silhouette until the sun comes up and the animation transitions from night to day. It’s a great transition and great use of colors by showing the black outline of a house.

In general, things are easier to animate when it’s dark. For example one scene takes place in a dark cave and the only things you can see in the animation at this point are the characters eyes. That’s a classic method of animation used by many, but it’s very effective when the animation is trying to be comical and is probably the most effective way of showing the viewer that it’s too dark for any of the characters to see.

Throughout the animation, there are many different dynamic transitions, such as when the man finds the cat and then picks up the basket and turns around holding the basket close to the camera. As the basket moves across the screen, it reveals the next scene in transition. As the basket is moving across the screen from left to right, on the right side of the screen you see the last scene, and when the basket has completely covered the screen it reveals the next scene on the left side of the screen. These dynamic types of transitions aren’t entirely necessary and important to the plot, but they grab the viewer’s attention.

In every scene of the animation, there’s a recurring song that tells the story of the cat returning to the man’s house. The lyrics are always the same and start with “And the cat came back the very next day.” This repetition of the song is representative of the man’s frustration with how the cat constantly returns every day to ruin his house. The repetition of his issues with the cat is put into song. Having the song play over and over again in each scene is an effective way to communicate, to the viewer, this repetition.

The pallet of colors used in the animation seems to be very traditional and very simple. It’s a very colorful animation with blue water, green grass and blue skies. But the color and textures are very simple. Being a colorful and simple-looking animation, that gives the animation a good, light-hearted feel. That’s effective for this animation because it’s supposed to be humorous. The shaky outlines of the characters also add to this feel because, even though it is very well animated, the shaky lines also make it feel as if it was animated by amateurs. But with outlines that were so inconsistent, the animators have to have known what they were doing.

In scene where the man is trying to take a cat far away from his house, the animator often tries to show the viewer how far away the man is going to get rid of the cat. In one scene we see the house way far off in the distance as the man drives the cat away. By keeping the house far in the distance and small, the view can understand how desperate this man is to get rid of that cat. We see exactly the distance he’s willing to travel to get rid of it. In some scenes we see the man go from small to big as he gets closer to the camera, or from big to small as he runs away from the camera.