But, is that the case? Of course looking at the most recent movie with a cat as a star: *Garfield, a tale of two kitties * one could say then that in the scenery is where they belong and not on front, but have cats been really that inert in the movies?
I made this thread as counter and sequel for the Dogs are gods in the movies, there **Beware of Doug ** commented that “Cats are scenery in the movies”. And then that “Cats are Props in the movies”.
Seeing he got no reply, I think it deserved a thread.
Cat Ballou and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof were not focussed on cats, but rather on people who had “cat” as a nickname. And Cat People was about big cats, not domestic cats.
There was Cats and Dogs, but one reason why cats are less often used as the lead is that they are so difficult to train. You can get Lassie or Rin Tin Tin to do all sorts of amazing feats, while cats will just stare at you if you try to train them.
For animated cats, you do have Tom and Jerry (at least one feature and many cartoons), plus, for shorts and TV, there are Sylvester, Babbit and Catsello (really), Claude Cat, Super Snoop, Mr. Jinx, and many others.
“The Cat Came Back” was voted one of the 50 greatest animated films and also has a cat as protagonist.
In addition to Homeward Bound: the Incredible Journey, there was the original Disney film The Incredible Journey.
The Adventures of Milo and Otis had a cat as one of the title characters.
Cats serve a very important purpose in movies. Whenever a character hears something mysterious and they carefully investigate, a cat always leaps out of the closet, giving the character a few seconds to relax before they are painfully slaughtered by the zombie serial killer or whatever…
I like how, in early Bond movies, Blofeld (or whoever) strokes the Persian cat in a way that makes its eyes widen when they feed an incompetent henchman to the sharks. Yeah, I’d go with scenery.
Dogs have an urgent need to please people. Cats are of the opinion that people are on this world to please CATS. When a cat encounters a person who wishes to train cats, this is very confusing to the felines. Some cats are trainable (I happen to live with one), but they also train their humans, too (my cat has trained my husband to cover her up when she’s chilly).
Assuming this is not intended as a joke but is based in somehow actually not knowing the subject matter of these films, “Octopussy” has nothing to do with cats and the cat in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” is “Maggie the Cat,” who is in fact a human being.
But cats aren’t trainable in the short time frame required to make a movie. Basically, the only thing that interests them are treats; one animal trainer said the three keys to training cats are “food, food, and food.”
The cat who calls me Mama is very motivated by attention and affection. In fact, that’s WHY she calls me Mama. She made that vocalization once by accident, I praised and petted her extravagantly, and now she says Mama when she wants attention. No food was involved. However, I do agree that most cats are most strongly motivated by food.