“The World is Hell” – Felidae (1994)

“Animals are good human beings, and human beings are evil animals.”

Not too long ago, I was hired to write a brief and fairly surface-level explainer of German krimi films for a client. Who knew that I would shortly be putting that same knowledge to use while watching an animated feature about housecats complete with an English-language theme song performed by Boy George?

Released in 1994 and adapted from the 1989 novel of the same name, Felidae was, at the time, the most expensive German animated feature ever produced. And for that, it is a… wild choice.

To understand Felidae one has to, I think, understand the German krimi genre, at least a bit, for it is obviously that filmic tradition in which Felidae is operating, more so than any other. For those who aren’t familiar (and didn’t bother to check out that link above), German krimi films were made primarily between 1959 and 1972, and served as precursors of the later Italian giallo.

Usually adapted from stories by British mystery and thriller author Edgar Wallace, krimi films share a number of common motifs, but in general they, like the gialli that would come after, were stylish murder mysteries, often with extremely elaborate plots.

The murder mystery at the heart of Felidae could have been lifted straight from a krimi, and will also seem familiar enough to those who only know the later giallo pictures. (The action has even been shifted to London, as is almost always the case in krimis.) The difference here is that all the main characters (sleuth, antagonist, femme fatale, victims, red herrings) are animated housecats.

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This does not, however, mean that Felidae is any less grisly than a live-action film of its kind. In fact, quite the opposite. While the murders take place mostly offscreen, without the brutal stalking and slashing sequences popularized by the giallo, the aftermath is shown in gory detail. Cats have their entrails ripped out, their heads torn off, and more – including one particularly queasy death of a pregnant cat and her unborn litter.

Nor does it end there. The backstory which provides the frame and motive for the murders involves a laboratory in which illegal experiments were performed on cats stolen from the neighborhood, meaning that we see vivid sequences of torture and vivisection, and Francis, the feline sleuth trying to solve the murder, has a nightmare involving an endless hellscape of gruesome cat corpses made to sit up and dance by a mad puppeteer.

This movie would be essentially impossible to watch for anyone who is squeamish about violence against (even animated) animals, is what I’m saying.

The film also doesn’t shy away from depicting realistic cat sex, and the plot goes to the kinds of bizarre places one might expect in a krimi – there is a weird feline cult that practices voluntary electroshock, and a main aspect of the plot grapples with themes of eugenics echoing Germany’s Nazi history (albeit in ways that seem a bit confusing, given some of the original author’s later stances, as we’ll get into below).

It’s an animated cat movie that would very much be rated R, if it had been made in the States, and it remains a fascinating oddity, whether you like it or not, for how it translates one genre (largely unfamiliar to most modern American audiences) into an entirely new form (that of the animated talking animal movie).

I don’t know enough about it to tell you about the circumstances of its production, besides that the book upon which it was based was a bestseller which spawned a string of sequels. (Though the cozy mystery genre in the States is rife with cat-focused books, it’s hard to imagine one where the cats are perpetrators, victims, and sleuths, let alone one so brutal and bloody.)

Unfortunately for anyone who may want to pursue the books, the author, Akif Pirincci, has since been “canceled” – and rightly so. “I don’t give a flying fuck if people call me a Nazi,” he told German newspaper Die Zeit, “I don’t give a damn.”

This was in response to questions about his relationship with the German far-right neo-Nazi party Alternative for Germany, but Pirincci would soon make his position even clearer in a horrifically racist keynote speech at the first anniversary of the “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West” protest in 2015, where he said a bunch of stuff that I’m not going to repeat here, though you can read some of them on his English-language Wikipedia page.

These comments led most booksellers to stop selling his books.

Pirincci also co-wrote the screenplay for the cinematic adaptation of Felidae, but I don’t know whether he gets any money from the Deaf Crocodile release of the movie on Blu-ray. With so many middlemen involved, it seems unlikely that he sees much, but Felidae is also on Tubi, if you’d rather check it out that way.

If you do, just be warned that, as Francis says within the films opening minutes, it isn’t “a pleasant story.”