You know when a movie bills Joe Barbera as its “Creative Consultant,” it is in big, big screen trouble. Hanna and Barbera are to Saturday mornings what Spelling and Goldberg are to prime time — mega-hit schlockmeisters whose legacies of cheap shots (both literal and figurative) have done so little for American television. And now Barbera is doing even less for American movies. Even Tom and Jerry fans — and there are lots of them — will have a hard time enjoying this cartoon. I couldn’t help but recall that scene in Singing in the Rain, where the silent screen star speaks her first lines. Richard Kind has a similar effect with Tom’s voice. I swear he studied Japanese import cartoons to come up with his annoying vocalization. It has a-dubbed-from-a -foreign-language quality — that wisecracking whine foreigners think sounds American — in (insult to injury) falsetto. Charlotte Rae’s evil Pristine Figg is nicely done, though the character and her interpretation is a composite lift from Disney villainesses (most notably Madame Medusa from The Rescuers, a movie Tom and Jerry resembles in too many, and too few, other ways as well). Anndi McAffee as young Robyn Starling brings the only warmth to the show, an endearing performance that can’t save the picture but makes her worth watching for. There is a quality of the surreal in Tom and Jerry — The Movie that provides fleeting moments of interest: an odd little line-drawn dance sequence, some strangely shadowed cel coloration, and Henry Mancini’s golightly score. It’s sort of like bits of a Cappio commercial scattered throughout the film. Only, the Cappio commercial makers strove for their hip, retro slant while the makers of Tom and Jerry — The Movie let theirs slip in by accident — relics from past successes that might well have been accidents then, too.
This article appears in August 6 • 1993 (Cover).