‘10 Lives’: Sundance Review

Dir. Christopher Jenkins. UK. 2023. 88 mins

This sweetly-charming children’s animation from the UK goes back to basics in style and content, grooming a smart idea into a purring success. Super-experienced animator Christopher Jenkins may ostensibly appear to be playing it safe, but his fat cat Beckett should have the film’s target audience of under-10s and their minders easily in the hat.

Grooms a smart idea into a purring success

With audiences losing enthusiasm for the slick, sermonising sanctimoniousness and cheerless marketing of recent big studio animations – in which Wales-born Jenkins has worked to award-winning success – here is a nifty little premise of a smug and selfish feline who blows his happiness and has to scramble through a new set of lives in an attempt to make things right. Easily transportable, streamable and Saturday-morning-showable, 10 Lives premieres at Sundance in the Special section. It knows its place and its demographic, but owns it as well.

The animation is clean and sun-dappled, set in England’s Dorset coast which is happily multi-racial and modern. (There are few ‘in-jokes’ for adults, but British grown-ups won’t miss the fact that the film’s chief villain, voiced by Bill Nighy, bears more than a passing resemblance to hardline Conservative politician Jacob Reese-Mogg). Here is where Beckett (voiced by UK comedian Mo Gilligan), a sort of ‘Top Cat’ of the Jurassic Coast, has been recklessly milking his way through life, or lives, in pursuit of the next meal and comfortable lap.

His cynical attitude towards humans changes when he is adopted by graduate student Rose (Simone Ashley), and he commences an idyllic life in her picture-perfect cottage as she works on her study of the bee population for the stooping, suspicious Professor Craven (Nighy). 

Beckett’s core selfishness does not change as a result of his new circumstances, however, and this by-now very fat cat loses his last life when he tries to keep Rose all to himself by meanly getting rid of her boyfriend Larry (Dylan Llewellyn). Now Beckett has to plead his case with vet’s assistant/heavenly gatekeeper Grace (Sophie Okonedo) who gives him a chance, or nine – but it’s not what he thinks.

Kids will enjoy watching this haughty cat get humbled as he tumbles through karma and learns about how precious life is. As he moves from chance to second-chance, his Bowie-like different coloured eyes are the only indicator that it’s Beckett we’re watching, fighting on for his one true love Rose but in the guise of a rat, or even a cockroach.

Zayn Malik – by-now far beyond the reach of the target audience but hitting a sweet spot for parents who were One Direction fans – is drafted in to voice two bumbling side characters and provide some original tracks, which are suitably candy floss without being particularly memorable. (Of particular amusement is how his biography makes a studied no-mention of his boy band origins.) Nighy and Okonedo, in particular, give spirited, lively performances in support.

With decades of experience as an animator, from the Disney heyday of Aladdin and The Little Mermaid and on to Sony and Blue Sky, Jenkins clearly knows what he is doing on a technical level but also, more crucially, the storyboarding process here is sharp in a deceptively smooth style. There is not a minute of fat to trim, and a lovely satisfaction in watching him expertly carve up the numbers of lives, award each their appropriate time, and put them into the over-riding mix of Rose’s peril at the hands of the oily Professor Craven. 

Yet what stands out is how, even after all these years in the business, Jenkins clearly has still has the spirit of fun and storytelling aimed at small children and that’s the loveliest thing of all. Modest though this film may be, it’s a genial achievement.