Tom and Jerry Parent Guide

Unsurprisingly to those of us who grew up watching their original cartoons, Tom and Jerry (voiced variously by William Hanna, Mel Blanc, June Foray, and Frank Welker) are still up to their usual violent stunts. But they’ve gone upscale: they’re both living in the exclusive Royal Gate Hotel in Manhattan. This poses a problem for the hotel management, since Ben (Colin Jost) and Preeta (Pallavi Sharda), New York’s most celebrated couple, have chosen the hotel as the location for their upcoming wedding. Clearly, the Royal Gate can’t afford to have a mouse seen on the premises during one of the biggest events of the year, so they’ve hired Kayla (Chloe Grace Moretz), a driven young woman with a suspiciously perfect resume, to make the potential public relations disaster go away. To prevent a nuptial nightmare, Kayla will need to manage Tom and Jerry as well as her supervisor Terrance (Michael Peña) who believes that Kayla isn’t who she claims to be…

I expected this movie to be roughly as entertaining as eating paste, and I was right. Following other classic cartoon reboots like Scoob!, or heaven forbid, Yogi Bear, this didn’t exactly have stiff competition, and it’s about as good as these precursors. The most irritating issue in the movie is with the animated characters. The animators have tried to emulate classic 2D cartoon animation in a 3D CGI format, and it looks remarkably bad. Space Jam came out in 1997 and it did a considerably better job of integrating animation with live action.

The content concerns in this film all revolve around the ludicrous amount of slapstick violence, which shouldn’t come as any surprise to viewers familiar with the franchise. Since the movie’s animated, the consequences are quite literally shrugged off, but most of these acts would otherwise be fatal. Severe beatings, frequent electrocutions, and a number of car accidents are to be expected…and are delivered with gusto. On the plus side, the violence balances out with an almost complete absence of other issues – apart from the fact that the protagonist is functionally engaged in identity theft, which isn’t perhaps the kind of moral lesson you want to give your kids.

The older I get, the less sympathy I have for characters like Jerry. As a kid, you cheer for them because they are an unholy, unstoppable force of nature. They act on their whims and never face consequences for their bad behavior – a child’s fantasy. As an adult, I’m on the Tom side of this equation. I think as we age, we all turn into Wile E. Coyote to some degree, and we stop sympathizing with the instigator of the chaos. For adults, Tom and Jerry will likely prove a frustrating way to spend 90 minutes. For kids… well, just make sure they understand that if they clobber any friends or siblings with an iron, the results are more likely to be fatal than funny.